External Hard Drive

[STUARTINPERTH]

Having recently had some problems with my pc and having to reformat, thankfully not losing anything of great importance, I am looking to get an external drive, probably about 1tb.
I do have firewire 400 port on my pc so would probably use it over usb 2.
want something reliable about £100 mark.
what do you guys use.

option 2 = online stprage site such as livedrive?

[Alun]

One Seagate 500GB portable drive, one WD My Passport 350GB portable drive, one Seagate Expansion 1TB external drive. My Maxtor 1TB drive gave up the ghost suddenly and I've been unable to retrieve the data - lucky 90% of it was backed up on the other three! The Seagate appear to be very reliable - so far.
Alun

[Lez S]

Try these Stu - combined, they are a little over your budget, but an easy way to maintain a back-up.

Icy Box 3.5" x 2 Black JBOD SATA Enclosure - USB

With 2 of these

Samsung Spin Point F3 SATAII NCQ 500GB 16MB Cache Hard Drive <9.0ms 7200rpm - OEM

I use WD drives (have 6 of them in my PC), a bit dearer but never had a problem with them.

[CSD_Images]

I use WD Passport drives as external back ups/portable storage. However since I have a e-SATA dock on my main workstation I now mainly use that as external stoarage and keeping the drives in an anti-static bag when not in use. It's cheaper to buy 1Tb or 2Tb drives as cartridges and swap them out as needed. You can buy e-SATA docks for about £20 from various places. When doing so make sure your OS and BIOS is AHCI enabled, which XP throws a hissy fit at if you're not careful during install or repair.

e-SATA is the fastest interface if you have an internal SATA connection (most modern PCs for the last 2 years) then FireWire, after which USB 2. USB 3 is faster than USB 2 and FireWire but drives are few and far between plus the lack of Mobo support as well.

As to on-line storage I refuse to use it for several reasons:

1. What happens if the company goes bust?
2. Data integrity/confidentiality
3. ISP data caps in the UK