Are these any good ??

[beamish]

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.203-0809.aspx

Anyone offer any feedback about these or the brand ??

Ta, Karlo

[Viking]

Karlo,

I have used Maxtor. They are a recognised brand. The cost of external usb drives is either falling or the gigs are increasing - good news.

John

[beamish]

Cheers John

[tinvek]

just to second that, i use maxtor for my external backup(s) and they've never let me down despite me not being the most carefull with his comp stuff

(watch them all fail now )

EDIT : p.s. thats a good price

[beamish]

Cheers ,yeah it looks it. I was reading another thread and Gaz mentioned a 7200rpm ext drive, and these came up on a search. Given the hassle of copying almost 30Gb of avi's from a chocked up lappy I think this may prove to be the answer.

Ta, Karlo

[tinvek]

well i had to do a full wipe of my desktop pc last week and i trnasfered over 500 gb of stuff no problem onto my large® maxtor.

to be honest it was so easy it makes you lazy, rather than sort out what i needed i just copied everything and am slowly sorting what to keep a bit at a time

[adamsp123]

Only 500 gig !!! you need one of these

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/145041

actually not a bad price I am tempted myself

[PaulG]

Karlo

I have the 160gb version, apart from a small delay to access the drive it has never let me down so far.

The 160gb a few months ago was £40.00, prices are falling nicely

Paul

[Psychobilly]

I have added a couple of 1TB Iomega ones... first thing i do when i come in is uploaded copies of all the cards from the cameras onto that drive under a date/scope/card_no directory structure... working copies of files are then taken from there the originals are never changed and kept warts and all... one drive is backed up to the second every few days...

Billy...

[tinvek]

Only 500 gig !!! you need one of these

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/145041

actually not a bad price I am tempted myself

funnily enough my desk pc has 2 internal toshiba 1Tb hard drives, one came with it and last week i got serious problems with the vista install and couldn't even access it as the graphics drivers and / or vista got corrupted leaving me with a black screen (yes that is black not blank). rather than risk reinstalling over the existing install i got a second hard drive and did a fresh install on that and then recoupled up the original drive to transfer data off it before formating it now i've got a hell of a lot of spare storage. rather than do a raid setup i now copy all the important data to the second internal drive when ive finished with it as well as to the external backups each week

[RichieJarvis]

I would avoid Maxtor like the plague - they make noisy unreliable drives - I used to have a couple in my MythTV box (which is constantly recording TV to the HD), and they failed spectacularly.

I've also read posts from others on the web complaining about them in the past.

Personally, I stick to Seagate drives nowadays, and don't have problems with them.

Remember to backup your data regularly (i.e. get 2 USB drives!)

Cheers,

Richie

[adamsp123]

Any very important also should be backed up on CD or DVD disk and kept safe. I have seen a scenario where 2 hard drives in a system failed virtually at the same time.

[beetlejuice]

I would avoid Maxtor like the plague - they make noisy unreliable drives - I used to have a couple in my MythTV box (which is constantly recording TV to the HD), and they failed spectacularly.

I've also read posts from others on the web complaining about them in the past.

Personally, I stick to Seagate drives nowadays, and don't have problems with them.

Remember to backup your data regularly (i.e. get 2 USB drives!)

Cheers,

Richie

Well, I supose you can be unlucky with anything mechanical. My Maxtor 250Gb external drive is four years old and has never given me a problem. I did have a failed Seagate drive a few years ago though.

[Ben Ritchie]

I have seen a scenario where 2 hard drives in a system failed virtually at the same time.

I've had this recommended too - with "RAID" systems (where your data is stored on two or more disks, with the aim that if one fails then nothing is lost) you should use disks from different manufacturers. If you buy two of the same disks at the same time you'll probably get the same manufacturing batch, and the time-to-failure is apparently fairly similar throughout a batch - so if one dies, the other is ready to pop too.

Dunno how much actual truth there is there, but i've been told it a sufficient number of times by people who do that sort of thing for a living to believe it.

[beamish]

Interesting replies guys, the reason I asked is that I need a fast writing, portable ext HD to drop the AVi's to, 160Gb is probably big enough for those few occasions. For PC back up I'd already eyed up the Tosh 1Tb.

Curious isn't though, 18 mnths ago I was happy with a couple of 5 fr/p/s

avi's of 30sec !

Now I'm looking at totals of Gb and rising

Karlo