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back to article Choose Smarter: Ten… USB 3.0 External Hard Drives

Hard drives are still the most cost-effective way of adding extra storage capacity to a desktop or laptop. They are cheap to buy, easy to use and remarkably robust in service. Solid-state drives may be quicker, but while the prices of hard drives continue to fall, their capacity goes on climbing, so the overall cost per …

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  1. batfastad
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    Rugged

    I've got a couple of the older generation Lacie Rugged orange drives and they are good. The robust enclosure just gives a bit of peace of mind if you have to lug around backups offsite everyday.

    I just wish someone out there would make an enclosure like that (but perhaps even better) so you could fit your own drive. I'd be tempted to stick an SSD in one for added shock proofery, though SSDs aren't exactly renowned for their data reliability just yet.

    What I'd also like to see is someone create an mSATA enclosure to fit these types of SSD... http://regmedia.co.uk/2010/11/08/blade_1.jpg

    120GB+ of rapid shock-proof storage in something smaller than a 2.5" enclosure would be excellent.

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    1. MrT
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      Re: Rugged

      +1 for the Lacie Rugged drives. I've gone through a few WD Passports that couldn't survive the bumps and bashes that catch a normal briefcase or laptop bag. Where I used to work they bough a dozen Passports for a project with sixth-formers and by the year end half had failed through shock. On the strength of that I bought a 120GB Lacie Rugged with FW400 and FW800 as well as USB2 and it hasn't let me down in over 4 years. Getting tight for space now though.

      But these days USB sticks are moving into the sub 128GB market nicely so spinners need to be 1TB or bigger to make sense, and at that capacity with portable drives the £20 or £30 extra for a rugged version is worth every penny.

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      1. batfastad
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        Re: Rugged

        Yeah been tempted to get a larger USB stick but the speed of them just isn't there yet. I can happily boot Virtualbox VMs from a 2.5" USB HDD. The newer USB 3 sticks seem to be fast though, there's a Kingston USB 3 monster out there somewhere that's meant to be rapid.

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      2. Chris Parsons
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        Re: Rugged

        I echo Mr T's sentiments. Never have Passports lasted for very long and the most trivial shock seems to kill them.

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  2. Neoc

    nice, but not what I'm after...

    Hey, El Reg...

    I currently have a RAID5 14TB rack-mounted fileserver I built myself (I tinker - my wife gave me a full-size 19" computer rack for one of my birthdays) which is about to reach the end of its life. I don't feel the need to build yet another one, so how about reviews of rack-mounted fileservers?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Re: nice, but not what I'm after...

      RAID 5? 15TB? Eeek!

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  3. Ramazan

    but there are 2TB drives on the market

    like Western Digital My Passport 2 TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive WDBY8L0020BBKNESN ($199 on eBay, $190.86 at Amazon). Why didn't you include it in the review? Of course Samsung M2 (and S2 BTW) is very good drive, but you won't see 1.5TB and 2TB drives from Samsung in the nearest future IMO.

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