External HDD : Which manufacturer?

[radhak]

I need a large external HDD, and the 30% live discount at ebay beckons.

Thing is, I see a bunch of similarly priced units (between $125 - $150) on ebay, making the final cost to me around $100 after the discount - pretty good, imho.

Which would you recommend?

- Seagate
- Western Digital (see only Home version, not a Pro version)
- Maxtor
- Lacie (one with firewire and USB)

I could live with USB, but an added firewire port could do no harm.

I am told Lacie have a Samsung inside it.

Btw, does the live discount apply to the shipping cost too?

[dbhost]

I need a large external HDD, and the 30% live discount at ebay beckons.

Thing is, I see a bunch of similarly priced units (between $125 - $150) on ebay, making the final cost to me around $100 after the discount - pretty good, imho.

Which would you recommend?

- Seagate
- Western Digital (see only Home version, not a Pro version)
- Maxtor
- Lacie (one with firewire and USB)

I could live with USB, but an added firewire port could do no harm.

I am told Lacie have a Samsung inside it.

Btw, does the live discount apply to the shipping cost too?

All are reputable names. If I recall, Maxtor got bought up by Seagate a while ago now. I tried Samsung drives a few years ago, and am very happy with them, fast, quiet, and they run cool. No failures yet. Outlived my Western Digital drives by a decent margin already...

If I were in the market for one, I would be leaning toward the Seagate or the Lacie.

Big deciding factor is if there is anything restricting me from using it with Linux like some Windows proprietary drivers or something that otherwise does not conform to open standards. Without knowing specific model #s, I would be hard pressed to tell you that...

I avoid the Live cashback stuff as I do not do business with Microsoft unless I absolutely have to...

[LinuxRandal]

I have been buying Seagate due to the five year warranty (on the drives I looked at). I used to only buy dead drives and get them exchanged when I had a used computer store (out of business).
I did recently buy a 500GB usb drive for $90 (locally Sunday paper sale) and found out it had/has issues with formating under Linux, yet I was able to partition it, and then format it.

Now I have another pc coming (laptop/netbook hybrid) and used the cashback, and the pc comes with a embedded Linux os. (it also comes with a XP or Vista choice of License) so I used them to get another Linux box (even though dual boot type).

[cgallery]

I'm fairly partial to Seagate. Doing quite a bit of recovery work, I've found their drives to be pretty solid. And I like the serial interface to the drives, too. Quite a bit more sophisticated than some other products.

Whatever you do, though, lay the drive horizontally. Many of the external drives I get for recovery are external units that stand vertically. After some time, somebody knocks 'em over (while spinning), which usually causes a head crash and sometimes (if you're lucky) a stuck spindle.

[pelligrini]

I really like my WD 250GB USB MyBook external drive. I also use several of them at the office, 3 in a backup rotation for our MS Small business server, another for temp storage of some huge 3D rendering files, and another for a secondary backup of our office and dwg files.

I have a Seagate 500GB eSATA at home that I have been really pleased with.

I recently bought a Seagate 1TB Freeagent Pro. It's USB/Firewire/eSATA. It's not bad, but I wouldn't recommend it. It may look cool, but there are some functionality problems. The power switch is a big pain. It didn't come with an eSATA cable. You can't use any of the configuration utilities if connected via eSATA. There can be some power cycling issues too.

[herb fellows]

I have an old Seagate 160gb, bought about 3 years ago, no issues. Not a clue on the techno end of things, just reliability.