Just over a month ago, perhaps 6 weeks at best, I noticed my LaCie mobile hard drive started making crunching noises. I spent a couple of hours trying to get the data off of it, plugging in the drive, start copying files, the drive would fail at some point, unplug the drive, plug it in again and continue on.
It was tiring.
But all in all, my LaCie drive did manage to survive over 2 years. I guess that’s not a bad lifespan but I hoped a drive might last longer than that!
Turns out I’m not the only one with hard drive issues.
So the next drive I bought was a Seagate FreeAgent Go. After speaking with a few people at London Drugs, it seemed like the best choice and was given some good feedback. So I bought the 500GB drive.
Well, yesterday I plugged it in after not using it for over two weeks and it started making noise… and it has been operating silently until yesterday. So I ran the diagnostics that came with it and a message came up that it needs to be serviced.
Lovely. Less than two months old and it’s already junk.
Do these manufacturers not TEST anything? Is everything these days made so poorly that you’re lucky to get it home before it breaks? Did I just get the 1 bad drive in 100?
So, I put to you… do you own a portable hard drive? If so, would you recommend the one you own or something else?
6 Comments
I had some serious drive issues about two years ago with Seagates. They had a really bad spell there for a bit.
What I’ve resorted to is the DNS-323 (http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509) that has a Raid 1 setup. One fails, just put in a new one and it recreates the RAID. Nice product.
dan’s last blog post..Pics are up from the Hotspring trip!
Not exactly ‘portable’ though, Dan. I need something I can pack along with me.
At home I’ve got a 2 year old Buffalo TeraStation NAS (1GB) configured for RAID 5, also allows for swapping out 1 drive and it re-builds the RAID. Very happy with it.
I have two of the 500GB WD Essential drives and to date, no problems. Both are over two years old.
http://www.amazon.ca/Western-Digital-WDH1U10000N-Essential-External/dp/B000VZCEUI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1236198097&sr=1-2
Of course I’m using Amazon S3 these days and I’ve found it to be a better solution for backup than dicking around with a local HD. Let Amazon worry about failing drives…
backups are overrated. where would the excitement be if you had working hardware?
Seagate is in some bad mojo right now with their drives. I would stay away from them and Maxor.
shnewt’s last blog post..Well Colour Me Perplexed.
@midbach – do they make a portable drive with USB power? Those MyBooks need AC don’t they?
@shnewt – it’s kinda looking that way.
I think I may give SeaGate another chance, especially if I can swap mine for something else at London Drugs. If not, I guess I’m down to WD or back to LaCie.
Yeah, I believe that WD have the 2.5″ drives that just run off the USB. I wouldn’t mind one of those myself…