[Legion303]

Originally Posted by theshaggyfreak

You're going to get a certain unreliable stories about every single hard drive company.

This is true. The only drive failure I've had was a WD, but then I have multiple other WDs that are about 20 years old and still working great. Your best bet is to invest in multiple drives and go RAID or regularly back up one to the other.

-steve

[Damashii!!]

thanks again everyone for the feedback. i'm not patient enough to order online so i picked up the WD caviar and an enclosure at my local electronics store. oddly, they didn't have anything other than Toshiba, WD, Seagate, and i think Sony. no LaCie, though.

Originally Posted by theshaggyfreak

You're going to get a certain unreliable stories about every single hard drive company. I used to use a few Lacie drives but I've had fairly early failure rates on a few and not just the drives but the enclosure too.

Right now I have one of these Seagate Goflex drives that I use for backup purposes and it's been one of the more reliable external drives that I've had.

i know, but i wanted to at least get a general consensus on a few trusted brands. if seagate keeps you rolling that's awesome, but i'm going to keep my distance for quite some time.

Originally Posted by Legion303

This is true. The only drive failure I've had was a WD, but then I have multiple other WDs that are about 20 years old and still working great. Your best bet is to invest in multiple drives and go RAID or regularly back up one to the other.

-steve

yeah, i explained my situation to the clerk there and he also suggested RAID. i never heard of that term, his explanation went over my head, and wikipedia's not helping, so you think you can pm me the gist of what "RAID" is in layman's terms?
(you could post it here too if you want, but my issue has been resolved so i didn't want to veer offtopic)

[prophetik music]

no, don't do raid unless you're talking about four or five drives. waste of money otherwise when a simple backup program like cobian can do it easy.

think easy for now and upgrade later. just pick one or two drives and roll with it.

i cover the basics of raid in my guide in my sig, but let's put it this way - in all my builds, i've done raid arrays twice. one was a twenty-drive array with five backups, and one was a ten with five backups. there's almost always a better solution for small-time stuff.

[Damashii!!]

Originally Posted by prophetik

no, don't do raid unless you're talking about four or five drives. waste of money otherwise when a simple backup program like cobian can do it easy.

think easy for now and upgrade later. just pick one or two drives and roll with it.

i cover the basics of raid in my guide in my sig, but let's put it this way - in all my builds, i've done raid arrays twice. one was a twenty-drive array with five backups, and one was a ten with five backups. there's almost always a better solution for small-time stuff.

yeah, i'm not a computer noob but i definitely have no idea what you're all talking about i'll totally be checking out your sig links to be more informed for my future endeavors.

thanks again so much for the suggestions everybody. as of now i've unfortunately lost about 120 GB of files, but the new drive is 3TB so that give me room to make up for it.

peace
jordan