Most Reliable external HD?

This does not work. Seriously, do not depend on metallic conduction to keep a big hard drive cool. LaCie external drives have been specifically known for several years to be especially bad in this regard--Google it.

Get one of the free SMART utilities that monitor the temperature of your drive, and you will see that "conduction" enclosures routinely run the drive in the red.

You want airflow, either forced flow with a fan or a well-designed convection enclosure.

As has already been said, all of the popular brands are good.

As has also been said, but is worth reiterating: Do not depend on any single drive for anything you don't want to lose, ever. All hard drives will fail, eventually. It's only a matter of time.

Buy two drives, or an enclosure that takes two drives and does RAID1. And keep offsite backups as well.

RDKirk wrote in post #9962106
This does not work. Seriously, do not depend on metallic conduction to keep a big hard drive cool. LaCie external drives have been specifically known for several years to be especially bad in this regard--Google it.

Get one of the free SMART utilities that monitor the temperature of your drive, and you will see that "conduction" enclosures routinely run the drive in the red.

You want airflow, either forced flow with a fan or a well-designed convection enclosure.

There are no "forced flow with a fan" or "well-designed convection enclosure" I know of that fits my 2.5" notebook backup drive AND fits in my pocket. There's metal, or plastic. I've been building high-end custom gaming PCs for years, and know a thing or two about airflow (which is actually for amateurs; I prefer watercooling). But I'm talking about a pocket-sized 2.5" notebook backup drive, maybe you missed that part in my post?

Oh, I know 100% not to depend on one single drive for anything -- I have 1.5TB of space on my laptop, this is purely for backup. Don't think I want to deal with any sort of network drive, the WD "books" seem to be good.

I use a Microsoft Home server to backup all of my PC's/ Laptops. It also has a shared file section for my photos that all of the PC's in the house can access and save to.

Wayne

hyt wrote in post #9964083
There are no "forced flow with a fan" or "well-designed convection enclosure" I know of that fits my 2.5" notebook backup drive AND fits in my pocket. There's metal, or plastic. I've been building high-end custom gaming PCs for years, and know a thing or two about airflow (which is actually for amateurs; I prefer watercooling). But I'm talking about a pocket-sized 2.5" notebook backup drive, maybe you missed that part in my post?

This is what the OP is talking about:

As for airflow being for amateurs, that "amateur" class includes the State Farm Insurance and the Department of Defense, which run the number one and number two largest networks in the world--and they do air cooling.

I've been building business machines myself since 1988. I'd say "high end gaming machines" may be nifty, but they are for amateurs, by definition not for people who are running a day-to-day business with them.

WD are generally what I use. A good external case (something that has air flow) or even another machine would be preferred.

If you're trying for the safest solution for data backup, I'd go with a combo of what some people have said. A raid 1 set on-site and a full backup off-site (1 drive or another raid set). There's no 100% solution but it's a pretty good bet not much will happen to both sets at once (unless you store your off-site backups next door).

Get a name brand drive. As has been said, they all fail. I use internal drives in external enclosures. At present I have a 500GB Samsung drive (USB) for raw photos, and a1.5TB Seagate drive (Firewire) for backup with Time Machine. I've used Western Digital and lots of others. (I have a 1TB Seagate spare and assorted 2.5" drives hanging around.) If you think a drive is acting strange, don't even wait. Replace it.

RDKirk wrote in post #9966276
As for airflow being for amateurs, that "amateur" class includes the State Farm Insurance and the Department of Defense, which run the number one and number two largest networks in the world--and they do air cooling.

I've been building business machines myself since 1988. I'd say "high end gaming machines" may be nifty, but they are for amateurs, by definition not for people who are running a day-to-day business with them.

The OP wanted an external drive for backup, and I simply offered a suggestion that works for me and plenty of other people. If you think that everyone should be using forced-induction tabletop RAID enclosures for occasional backup, then that's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but I don't quite understand why you feel it necessary to shoot down everyone else's. Plenty of people have used enclosed notebook drives (both prebuilt and self-built) as backup, and they work just fine.

I was using the term "amateur" figuratively, but with all due respect, your examples of State Farm and the Dept of Defense are not relevant - their systems are prioritized on cost effectiveness, not absolute performance. Air cooling is cost effective, and I'm not knocking it for the average home or business user. But for absolute effectiveness? It doesn't touch liquid cooling, which is almost required at the level of overclocking today's enthusiasts run their top-end gaming rigs, which you dismiss so offhandedly. To use an even more extreme example, look up what kind of cooling the Cray XT5 Jaguar (as of Nov 2009, the world's fastest supercomputer) uses. It ain't air; in fact, Cray calls air cooling a "technology of yesterday" (lol).

http://www.cray.com …t/whitepaper_ec​ophlex.pdf

Again, I'm not knocking air cooling; I'm merely pointing out that business machines are merely one out of many categories of computers, and there are at least several that are far more demanding in terms of performance and HVAC requirements. To get back on topic, in my experience as a family photographer who backs up about 250GB of photos and movies about once a month, my 500GB 2.5" drive in an aluminum pocket-sized enclosure does just fine, and has never gone much beyond room temperature even after a full backup. Anyway, enough on this topic from me. I wanted to offer an honest suggestion to the OP, not get into a debate or hijack the thread.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

I have WD. Had problems with the connections via the cases but never the drives themselves so...yeah. I like WD, but I've had to replace cases on both. I got better cases anyhow. More room to breath.

something new and slow. newer 5400 drives should last longer than 7200 rpm drives.

smcclelland wrote in post #9960394
Like others I have a bunch of enclosures and "safety nets". I use a WD Studio 1TB alongside my 1TB Time Capsule that has another 1TB hanging off of it. I've been lingering on ordering a Drobo or a DroboPro (video work sucks too many gigs of space doing post effects) but am waiting for a nice price point on the Drobo FS or DroboPro.

I also backup all my stuff off-site and have an external drive at my office as well.

I use this Drobo and it serves all my needs. Fully automated and gives me peace of mind: http://www.drobo.com/p​roducts/drobo.php

I have found my WD Passbook to be reliable, but as mentioned earlier, you need to backup in someway. Any HD can go at any time.

The OP spoke of horror stories of external drives failing. I told him why they fail: Overheating is the number one cause of external drive failure. It's not the brand of drive, it's poor drive enclosures, and the worst drive enclosures for overheating are those that depend on thermal conduction rather than forced airflow or designed air convection.

If he's worried about a 1tb external drive failing, the first thing he needs to look at is how its cooled, not the brand of drive--the companies that make 1tb drives are all good companies.

He's not going to watercooling, he's not a high-end gamer. He's looking for a cost-effective way to back his pictures up.

And you certainly did not see me advocating RAID for backups. RAID mirrors are a "high availability" solution, not a backup solution.