recommend me an external hdd

Time to sort out my external hdd's and backup strategy.

I'd like 2 identical external hdd's, probably 2x1TB. They'll be partitioned into 2x500GB, so I can have 500GB for music / photos and the rest for Time Machine.

I've looked in to getting a NAS but when it comes to bang for buck, 2 identical mirrored external hdd's seems like a good option when comparing security with spending.

Would love firewire but frankly, usb2/3 will do perfectly fine.

Quick google gives me loads of options but having hdd's fail on me before I'm keen to get something decent. Any recommendations?

G Tech G Drives. That is all. Expensive but worth it. Never LaCie.

Yeah had a look at those, and in ideal world that'd be what I'd get. But wouldn't two 1TB drives for say £80 each be good enough? I'll do a weekly backup and that's it, no constant use or moving around. The data will be mirrored over two drives so no big deal if one dies (as long as the other doesn't go simultaneously, but what are the odds)

2x 1TB GRaids? You can partition them both and voila, 4x500GB. Also FW800.

but is the extra monies actually worth it? The more I think about the, the more sense two cheap decent drives make.

I don't mind that it's only usb as I'm not using them that much anyway + two clones should make it safe enough

So the question is, what two decent drives? Mybooks?

I've gone through two cheap drives since feb, one western digital, one seagate. Both USB 3.

Regretting not shelling out on a proper drive, will be picking up a GRaid next time.

ouch. not good.

tbh it seems to be a lot of hit and miss with drives, at least cheaper ones? I've had a WD mybook that's been working fine for 3 years or so now. Only occasional use but still. Then you hear stories like the above which is almost the opposite

We use GRaids at the film production company where I work. Masters and clones. Out of about 30 drives, we have only had 1 fail. Pretty decent stats in favour of the GRaid, if you ask me.

Buy two drives from different manufactures or if you are buying two of the same model try and get them from different suppliers.You will reduce the odds of two drives failing at the same time. I have been in the situations were drives from the same batch failed at the same time due to buggy firmware or poor manufacturing. From personal experience would not recommend Seagate.

Also, what's wrong with backing up to "the Cloud" ? :)

^^ good points, thanks!

I'm avoiding the cloud for two reasons.

a) A friend of mine sat down to read through t's & c's, almost all of them had a clause stating 'we reserve the right to delete your data without prior notice should we deem it necessary'. Not good enough.

b) Upload would take ages, probably 3-4 weeks on Virgin (+ them getting arsy about it I assume), but that's ok. Downloading will prob take about a week - not good enough, too slow

We use GRaids at the film production company where I work. Masters and clones. Out of about 30 drives, we have only had 1 fail. Pretty decent stats in favour of the GRaid, if you ask me.

That's still pretty high failure rate! We've had a few problems with em too.
Been using WD 1tb FW drives day in day out for years and only ever had one failure (due to someone using the wrong power supply by accident). Got chatting to someone at Google, who collect data on manufacturer failures, and he said WD are far and away the most reliable

I think something a lot of people overlook with faulty hard drives, is that in many cases they are repairable.