fishmaven Loc: Ohio right now

Macsales has a 6TB drive at $300 and 3TB drives at $169. It doesn't matter if you have a Mac or PC. Call them and they'll talk you through reformatting the drive. 3 Year warrantee...

Dan Martin
fishmaven@gmail.com

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

I would tend to agree with your guy, although I don't actually know exactly how many companies are left that manufacturer drives. What I can add is that they do make various grades and models for various purposes and price points. My personal preference at the moment is WD (Western Digital) as they do a great job making it easy to identify the grade and type you are purchasing. I also like Seagate as they are now also doing a good job at that, but I do not like boxes that include an unknown drive as in some of the LaCie units. I'll spend more for 7200 RPM and a longer warranty as I know they will be faster and last longer (generally). While I do love SSDs for boot drives, I'm not sold on them for long term storage. YMMV. Best of luck.

BudsOwl Loc: Upstate NY and New England

Haven't tried one, but looked it up on google. New price about $900. Amoazon had used listed at $375 and up.

photoman022 Loc: Manchester CT USA

Some have alluded to it, I will state it outright: Get a backup to your backup! I have three external hard drives because they will all eventually fail (prayerfully at different times!) I've had two hard drives fail, I'm glad I had backups for the failed drives.

Silke Loc: Germany

I'm actually still using drives that are over 10 years old.
Granted, I don't access them much -- but I still use them.
I've had ONE drive failure. Ever. (And I have 6 or 7 I regularly access.)

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I've had 2 ior 3 drive failures. They were all the small USB-driven poclet sized drives. They got dropped, after which they were unable to start up. The small pocket size drives are easy to knock off a table so I've been using the larger drives that have their own power supply. They're not much bigger and could easily get dropped but since they're not as portable I tend to leave them in one spot behind all the stuff I need to access by hand.

And I have 10 year and older drives that still work but they're so small that they're not worth firing up. All the data were transferred to larger drives years ago.

Silke Loc: Germany

I just use the small ones for documents. :)
That's the nice thing about a drive caddy. Plug in HDD, off you go.
I've always butchered any retired PC for its parts, especially harddrives. (I *never* throw those out, too dangerous, and still usable.) You never know when something goes kerplonk. (I saved one machine with the powersupply from the previous one, when the PSU failed.)
Of course, the card reader in my current one just went kaput, so I had to order one of those USB things, as I don't fancy ripping out the internal one.