What’s the best brand of external hard drives? Is Seagate/Maxtor good?
Q. What I mean by “best brand”, I mean a company that produces a quality product that will last many years. I’d rather pay more for something that will be made VERY well.
Currently, I own Maxtor & Seagate external hard drives, but it said that the warranty is 5 yrs. Does that mean it will crash after that time? I have owned desktops that lasted twice that amount.
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Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital are all great brands. I would be happy with any of those 3. I recommend WD though. Hope this helps
If you really want good storage, and are willing to spend some money, look at getting a Network storage device (NAS).
The cheap ones usually allow raid 1 which will allow you to put a 2nd mirrored drive in (meaning both disks have the same data, in case one crashes)
The nice ones allow you to do higher raids that have even better performance.
SEGATE AND MAXETOR.
I have a Western Digital. I am using it for like 5 years now and I have had no problems so far. It has good read/write speed, reasonably priced nowadays and very reliable. Good customer support too.
Buffalo brand is also good. But they are quite expensive.
So my recommendation is Western Digital.
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I agree with John. Warranty is 5 years and will it crash after that time? Just think of what a warranty actually means. They feel most of their hard drives will last five years and they are willing to back that up. Even then, about 20% of those that had something covered under warranty will actually spend the time and money to enforce that warranty. Most do not want to do the packaging, they have problems finding where to mail it to, they lost the paperwork, have problems talking to the right person. The 20% varies by type of product and demographics. Those that never graduated from high school and living in poverty are more likely not to chase after a warranty. The very wealthy also rarely chase after a warranty. Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital have been good to me and my geek friends. Back in Minneapolis, I used to spend some happy hours with engineers from Seagate back when we went to the same bar after work. Nice bunch.
Better pay a bit more for an extra backup-hdd. And if u want’to be realy assured of safe data-storage u could buy an external raid-array of 2 hdd’s, for instance:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3994391&CatId=2421
or…
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4082295&CatId=2421
A warranty of 5 years means that the manufacturer is sure enough the hdd wil at least last 5 years to give a warranty for that period.
do not buy seagate, do not buy maxtor, both are really bad brands, WD all the way.
my mate has gone through two seagates and one maxtor, and my 5 year old WD 400gigs are still running happily. no problems.
First of all, Seagate purchased Maxtor, so they are both the same. I work in the digital storage industry and WD and Hitachi have been very reliable and performed well for us. Seagate has really gone down hill in reliability in the past 2 years.