Hard drives

[dave2010]

I keep buying hard drives for various purposes. A Toshiba 1 Tbyte portable USB 3.0 drive which i've bought for use as a backup drive (well, that's what it's being used for now) turns out to be slightly noisy, though now I've set up Time Machine, it's not on all the time. An alternative use might be to keep my music library.

Tonight I saw that Tesco have Samsung 750Gb USB 2 drives for under £50 in store. Might be a good buy if that's big enough for you. I'll report back later. This price offer runs to mid November. It is a reduction over the normal price.

[Mark Grant]

That's a a great price for Samsung S2 750GB and they are very quiet external drives ( 2.5" laptop drive in a case) , the prices are going up everywhere so dont think about it too long.

£70 to £80 everywhere else that actually has stock. Ebay traders will be buying them up from Tesco to put on ebay so be quick. :eek:

http://www.dabs.com/products/samsung-750gb-s2-ultraslim-portable-usb-2-0-9-5mm-piano-black-7QD0.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=product+search&utm_content=Q200

http://www.shop.bt.com/products/samsung-750gb-s2-ultraslim-portable-usb-2-0-9-5mm-piano-black-7QD0.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=product+search&utm_content=RR00

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/750gb-samsung-s2-usb-20-external-hard-drive-bus-powered?utm_source=google+shopping&utm_medium=google+shopping

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-143-SA

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-external/usb/hx-mu075dag22.html

[Arfa]

If your concerned about drive noise, you'd do well to check out this website here:-
http://www.silentpcreview.com/Recommended_Hard_Drives

They review all sorts of PC components from the perspective of silent operation. Generally, you need to go for a SSD or 2.5" laptop drive, albeit more expensive choices.

[Mark Grant]

Some interesting information on that site but it is annoying when adverts pop up to block off the text that I am trying to read.:steam::steam:

All that does is make my avoid buying anything ever from Cisco.

http://i759.photobucket.com/albums/xx234/server9/forum-pictures/silent-pc-review-Capture.jpg


Good point about the SSD although I guess Dave is looking for a large drive if he mentions a 750 GB

largest SSD I can see is a 512 GB for £546 :)
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT512M4SSD2

Nice but a bit spendy.

[webby]

I bought a western digital elements 1tb desktop drive from pc world online. I think it was £49 instore but £44 online and they also had 10% off data storage (which they may still have), so a good deal all round. It's USB 2 and fairly quiet and now houses my iTunes library.

[dave2010]

That's a a great price for Samsung S2 750GB and they are very quiet external drives ( 2.5" laptop drive in a case) , the prices are going up everywhere so dont think about it too long.

£70 to £80 everywhere else that actually has stock. Ebay traders will be buying them up from Tesco to put on ebay so be quick. :eek:

http://www.dabs.com/products/samsung-750gb-s2-ultraslim-portable-usb-2-0-9-5mm-piano-black-7QD0.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=product+search&utm_content=Q200

http://www.shop.bt.com/products/samsung-750g b-s2-ultraslim-portable-usb-2-0-9-5mm-piano-black-7QD0.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=product+search&utm_content=RR00

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/750gb-samsung-s2-usb-20-external-hard-drive-bus-powered?utm_source=google+shopping&utm_medium=google+shopping

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-143-SA

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-external/usb/hx-mu075dag22.htmlDon't give the ebay guys a whiff of this. However the model is an M2 not an S2, and works with USB 2.0 not USB 3.0. The manual supplied mentions USB 3.0, but this is incorrect, though the next generation wiil no doubt be USB 3.0 It seems that not all Tescos have them at this price, some are still at the much higher price. The online store had them for about £54 earlier today.

I can confirm that the Samsung drives are pretty quiet, so I might send my Toshiba 1 Tbyte back to Amazon to see if they can replace it with a quieter one, though I suspect the problem is with the model, rather than my specific instance of it. I think the Samsung models are a bit slower than the USB 3.0 Toshiba, even though I've only tested these with USB 2.0.

However, at the price it's reaonable for either cloning my hard drive, or for running Time Machine.

It comes with NTFS installed, which isn't great for Macs. There is a driver download from the Samsung site to enable Macs to write to the drive.

It works, but I gave up and reformatted mine with the extended Apple file system.

I work out the prices for these as I buy them. This one works out at 6.66p per Gbyte, or about 2.3p per FLAC CD copy. I try to keep the cost per Gbyte under 7p, but it's also good to match the disc size to the application. For Time Machine the 1 Tbyte option might be better than the 750 Gbyte models, as my machine is 640 Gbytes. On the other hand, if there aren't many changes, then there may be wasted space on a large drive with Time Machine. However it might only be possible to get one SuperDuper disk clone on either hard drive, in which case there'd be more space, and possibly unused, space on the larger drives. Re my iTunes/CD library, I'm expecting it to be over 2 Tbytes, so for the moment more heavy duty drives might be needed. I have some network drives which i might get operational again. I wish it would be possible to spread libraries oveer several volumes. It shouldn't be impossible technically, but I guess that iTunes doesn't have this capability yet, or that OS developers haven't developed a way of combining drives to form a sort of large virtual drive for common OSs. Maybe Linux or Unix do have this capability?

[bobbasrah]

Just a caution Dave on overstating the importance of USB2 v USB3, as these depend on the computer USB bus being USB2/3 compatible, and the transfer rate of the drive itself from its own portable's USB2/3 interface. Whichever is slowest and throttles will determine the transfer rate.

[dave2010]

Just a caution Dave on overstating the importance of USB2 v USB3, as these depend on the computer USB bus being USB2/3 compatible, and the transfer rate of the drive itself from its own portable's USB2/3 interface. Whichever is slowest and throttles will determine the transfer rate.I believe that USB 3 drives should go about 3 times faster than USB 2 drives, but you're are right that this depends on the USB interface. They won't go any faster if they are connected to a USB 2 port.

For me the merit of USB 3.0 is purely for future expansion, so that if I get new kit I will be able to plug it in and get the benefit of a speed bump then. As my current computers devices all use USB 2.0 I won't see any major benefit, though there are differences in running speed of different drives, but not necessarily because of the differences in USB.

[dave2010]

If anyone's interested, the Tesco/Samsung drives are available from their online store - only about £5 more than in store, so might be cheaper than driving, particularly if you're miles away, and have no other reason to go there - though I think that at present (did work last week) you can get 5p per gallon off petrol if you spend £50, so might balance out - http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.212-4252.aspx

I also found mention of a Seagate portable 1.5 Tbyte drive - http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.212-4721.aspx
I do wonder about that though, as I've heard rumours (only rumours though) about the reliablity of Seagate. I suspect that most of the drive manufacturers produce similar products, and there's always an element of a gamble when thinking about hard drives. I had a hard drive from Western Digital which failed within 8 days. It was brilliant for the first seven, then caput! Other people say they're very good. I don't disbelieve them. The La Cie drives I replaced that with have (so far) lasted longer, but are noisier. Other people haven't been so lucky with La Cie. Drives I've tried are from Buffalo, Toshiba (several - maybe 6), Samsung, La Cie, Western Digital. I have had failures with the Buffalos - but they were network models - more complex - and one failed when I tried to set up an automatic backup from one to the other. One is also out of action, but allegedly fixable with a reset, which I've not had time to do yet (that's maybe over a year!)

The danger of using large capacity drives is that when they fail you lose more, and they cost more to replace, though maybe they'll get cheaper in time. I reckon they go down between 25-50% per year, depending on the year and model.

The Toshiba USB 3.0 portable drive which started me on this - see Amazon Toshiba E05A100SBU3EW_C STOR.E ART 4 1TB USB 3.0 2.5 inch Hard Drive - Black - now gone up in price to 84.59 - is definitely much noisier than the Samsungs - unless it was just my particular unit. I think I'll see if Amazon can swap it at the price I originally paid - not worth paying the higher price.