I need a new external hard drive. Your recommendation?

[Lorien]

I'm going to need to wipe my hard drive, so I need to move everything to an external drive. What brands or models do you suggest as the most reliable?

[struggle4progress]

1. I spent some time poking around on the internet for drive recommendations early this year

and learned: (1) for every brand, there's someone who adores it and (2) for every brand, there's someone who thinks it sux eggs. I've got a couple of Western Digital "books" and a Lacie "rugged," none of which have given me any trouble so far

But I've started buying enclosures compatible with the machine that I'm connecting to. This gives me a way to mount and pre-test a new drive, if I decide I need to install one in the machine, and since I'm not using it for testing most of the time, the rest of the time I can drop in a drive and use the enclosure for back-up. I've got an IDE enclosure for an old machine and a SATA enclosure for my newer machines (both with USB connectors) -- and when the old machine started acting weird I could pull the drive, drop it in the IDE enclosure and connect it to another machine for a surface scan to find it had lots of bad sectors; then I had the replacement IDE hard drive ready to drop in

If you've got a network, you might consider buying a network enclosure

It's my impression a standard pre-packaged external hard drive costs more than a bare hard drive plus a simple enclosure. If you decide to buy a standard pre-packaged external hard drive, google the make and model: one manufacturer for one of its larger capacity drives was (silently) bundling two hard drives and people were finding that neither drive would work after one drive failed -- and since the unit was sealed, it wasn't a trivial project to pull the dead drive and replace it

[comtec]

2. Honestly... go cheap

if you are only goign to use this as a attached drive over USB, go cheap and as large as you think you need.
There are some good deals on 500GB external drives.

It gets exponentially more expensive if you add network connectivity - and do you need it?

In the end it's about need. a USB drive will be automatically supported, mounted, etc with no work on your part and it'll be cheap.

If you go for a network drive, that's quite a lot more work if it doesn't mount immediately the first time. That is assuming the way it communicates on the network is compatible with the Mac (some use this bit of software I can't remember now that is not Linux or mac compatible iirc)

So my two cents. a 500Gb drive here is as cheap as 40euros if its no-name and no-frills. That falls under good-enuf for what I need.
Beyond that what do you want the drive for/to do?

[Deja Q]

3. Firewire will be faster

More expensive too, but worth it...


http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

Firewire does sustained transfer rates FAR faster.

[onehandle]

5. Yep. Firewire still rules the transfer. nt

[onehandle]

4. I have bought external hard drives from Other World Computing for many years.

No problems with any of them ever. Excellent, excellent support.

www.macsales.com

[Lorien]

6. Thanks everyone! I appreciate it!