What external hard drive is best out of these?

I need a drive so I can backup everything that's important on my pc and also stuff I need to travel with. So I wanted at least 500GB space and feel like choosing one of these:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3301659&CatId=136

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3301662&CatId=136

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2204144&CatId=136

What external hard drive is best out of these?


I have never bought an external hard drive before and I need one that is going to be durable enough for me to take it on the road and planes. I don't want it to die and I just want one that is trouble free. I really don't want to spend so much money for nothing. I want to backup all of my important data so it's my life's work on the line. Please let me know which one is best and why. If you have any experience with them let me know...

Btw I heard Maxtor is the worst drive brand on the market... & I went to Seagates site yet I seen them advertise maxtor drives on there which they claimed were their "products". If Maxtor is made by Seagate I am really worried... I have a lot of friends that have lost all their data on Maxtor drives... I have no clue if Seagate is also Maxtor... But if so I'm worried...

 

I have an old Maxtor 30Gb HD and ive never had any trouble from it, unless maby they dont make then very good anymore. My C Drive is Seagate 80Gb about 2 years old, no problems with it. I also have a comstar 300Gb. These are all internal drives tho.
For traveling you should make a foam lined case for it, or maybe the box it comes in will do.

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2204144&CatId=136
is the best, it has 16MB Buffer Memory the others have no Buffer Memory.

 

the FREE AGENT PRO seem to be a really good spec and the warrenty is excellent they would be reluctant to give 60 month(5 years) unless the product was reliable,the only thing that concerns me is the base it has the connections built in so it does not pack flat and if you travel a lot as you say it is a small risk.

i have an IOMEGA 500 it has a base that you can remove for travelling it's 2 year old and runs almost all the time my PC is on i just shut it off at night and have had no problems.

http://www.bizrate.com/harddrives/products__keyword--iomega+external+hard+drive__nwylf--1.html


Iomega announces the Iomega Desktop Hard Drive XL Series, a four-drive enclosure with one terabyte (that is 1000 Gigabytes) of capacity. Designed for creative professionals and others who require the fastest editing speeds possible in today's small office and home office, the Iomega XL Series drive delivers advanced capacity and includes software for a complete data backup and disaster recovery solution...

http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/3349/isdd7segouk9xxhxl3g8tcxxl1.png

 

I agree with Bill, the one he said is the way to go.

 

Hi there,
I recently did a *truckload* of research on reviews regarding external harddrives for a guide that I wrote and to answer your question, the FreeAgent is definitely the best buy right now, unless you never actually power your pc down but prefer to leave it in standby mode all the time. As you're saying that you want to carry the drive around with you, that may not be an issue for you though. The software that comes along with the drive is a little bit crappy, but you'll never actually need it anyway.

*Don't* Touch the mybook essentials or anything else from WD in this particular product line unless it has 36 months of warranty. I found them to be either loud as hell (fan kicks in too often and makes noise equal to a vacuum cleaner most of the time), really slow (that's just the mybook world though) or frequently suffering from click-of-death occurance except for one or two products in all the series'.

The only thing with the FreeAgentPro is, if you need it to connect to multiple devices and some of them use firewire and some of them usb, you'll have to switch the base all the time because I couldn't find a version that has both usb and firewire ports in one base. But well...

If you wan't to be on the really safe side though, and are able to use a screwdriver - check this:
The only other reasonable thing you could do it to buy an enclosure and put a T166 (Samsung) or 7200.10 (below 500gb, seagate) into it. If you wan't something really realiable, that's also the only way you can use something like the Seagate Enterprise Versions of the 7200.10 within a portable device. And it's really easy to do, even if you've never did anything with hardware before.

For details on building your own external drive using an enclosure and internal drive, and every other question you may have on the topic of external harddrives, check my guide at http://externalharddrives.blogspot.com.

Hope it helped you a little.