[Gllug] recommendation for external hard drive

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Build one yourself if you care about what's in it, it may cost a little
more but...

For a start your drive should then be warranted for 3 to 5 years as
opposed to the 12 months you'd get with some ready made units. You can
also be certain of the brand. Most of the floundering external drives
people bring to me have crappy Maxtors inside, even the supposedly posh
ones from Lacie. They swap them round for whatever's cheapest at the
drop of a hat so you're always going to get the lowest grade drive.

I have heard of people who never have problems with Maxtor but I have
had nothing BUT problems with them. They once delivered 5 pallets of
Dell machines with Maxtor drives to my workplace and within a week of
beginning to install them we had to arrange to return the whole lot
because the out of the box fail rate was so high. They also cost me 30Gb
of very valuable personal data when both my (at that time very
expensive) 30Gb maxtor disks died within a day of each other less than a
week after the warranty expired, the main one AND the backup drive.
They're cheap shit, do not use them! (I also agree with the guy railing
on TalkTalk in the previous thread, they're awful, BEthere are the best
I've found so far in London)

For drives I used to recommend Seagate but sadly they've recently bought
Maxtor and dropped their standard drive warranties from 5 to 3 years so
my praise for them is not quite so unreserved anymore. I can't recall
ever having seen a failed Western Digital or failed Samsung sitting in
somebody's machine, although I have had a WD "MyBooks" in exhibiting the
infamous clank of doom once. In addition to Maxtor I'd give a wide berth
to Deskstars too - they're not known as 'Deathstars' for nothing!

You can get SATA/eSATA enclosures for about £15 and NAS enclosures for
about £30 from svp.co.uk and similar.

Also bear in mind they're inherently flaky devices, even the good ones
can pop at the drop of a hat. Whenever I think about the engineering
stresses and tolerances involved I'm surprised they work at all!

Cheers,

Roger Heathcote.




Na Nas wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I need to make sure that the external hard drive that I buy does work with
> Ubuntu. I need it to be usb-only-powered and to be portable.
>
> I'd be grateful for any recommendation.
>
> Thanks
> nanas
>
>   

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