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Looking to pic one up for photo storage for my wife. Doesn't need to be stellar, doesn't need to be huge, just needs to be reliable and sturdy. Any ideas? Any brands to stay away from?

Things get a little complicated because you're not just asking for good drive vendors, you're asking for good interface vendors. It's a package deal at that point.
-Brand isn't as important as model. Don't get a Seagate 3TB, for instance. Not because it's a Seagate, but because the 3TB models are notoriously crappy.
-Any drive will be hosed if you drop it, so remember to properly care for and feed your drive.
-Any external SSD is going to avoid most of the drop danger, but it will be more expensive.
-USB is the most universal way to get data in and out of you drive, and USB-only drives are the cheapest, but drives that have an additional FireWire/Thunderbolt/eSATA/whatever interface will give you a second road in to get your data if the USB part of it craps out.
-Your best bet for long-term archival storage is going to be to either get two drives and rotate between them or get a single enclosure that can do RAID-1 and make use of that feature.
-Your ultimate goal is going to be to have multiple copies of everything you care about. This can be the original + external, or it can be 2x external if it is something you want to delete from your internal drive.

Other people will surely chime in with their brand recommendations, I like to go a little deeper than just the name on the box when I choose something and I don't have anything handy. I did buy a 2.5" external recently but I admit that I chose it mainly because of its sale price.

--Patrick

I'm no expert in this... in fact, what I'm about to say may be entirely wrong, but I've had far better luck in longevity with powered external usb drives than I have with those that get their power entirely from the usb port.

Ravenpoe said:

I'm no expert in this... in fact, what I'm about to say may be entirely wrong, but I've had far better luck in longevity with powered external usb drives than I have with those that get their power entirely from the usb port.

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I've actually had just the opposite. I went through 2 externals with their own power supply before getting a 'My Passport' which has been doing great. Lasted 4 years so far through numerous moves and tons of movies and music put on it. It was decently priced too compared to all the other externals I was looking at.

Rovewin said:

I've actually had just the opposite. I went through 2 externals with their own power supply before getting a 'My Passport' which has been doing great. Lasted 4 years so far through numerous moves and tons of movies and music put on it. It was decently priced too compared to all the other externals I was looking at.

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It was a 1TB "My Passport" that went all to hell on me.

I do quoting for a few hundred users across a dozen departments or so, and WD's My Passport have been the consistently good choice in regards to price, durability, and portability. I've only heard good things of the My Passport Essential USB 3.0 series.

I've found powered externals to break more often, but that might be because there's more parts to break or lose, and my users are klutzes

That being said, I would recommend using both an external drive AND some kind of cloud-based backup. Dropbox or Google Drive are two good free options, and you can easily protect the data from password/file leaks (I'd google something like "<cloud service> easy encryption" to get started).

No matter which brand/model you choose, check Amazon reviews or somesuch for "bloatware." Most companies have a bad habit of loading some of their external drive models with auto-installing sofware that helps you back-up your files. This can actually be very useful, but if it's not something you want it can be a bitch to get rid of (both computer-side and drive-side).

See the hard part about this is that it's drive models that tend to go bad, not drive manufacturers, so without knowing what all is in the box, it's really hard to try and estimate the life of the box. So here are some questions to ask yourself that will help narrow it down.
1 ) How much stuff are you looking to store? 2.5" bus-powered drives can be had up to 1TB but they can get expensive at that size, while 3.5" 1TB drives can be had for $30 or less. One factor of a drive's price is the density of the data...the denser the data, the higher the price.
2 ) How long does this data need to last? SSD/Flash and mechanical drives will only reliably hold data on the shelf for 5-10 years. Optical media (burning it to CD-R/DVD-R/Blu-Ray) can last 25-50 years, easy (though you can't rewrite them).
3 ) How fast does it need to be, and how often/long will it need to be powered on? Is it going to be a drive you actually use, or just a locker where you shove the stuff you aren't using?
4 ) Will you need to encrypt the stuff you put on it? If so, will you need to encrypt all of it, or just some?
5 ) Is it going to be for a Mac/PC? Drives don't actually care if they're used with Macs or Windows, the drive just has to be prepared differently prior to being able to copy your stuff. So don't worry about what it says on the box, they can be converted back and forth pretty easily BUT you will lose everything when you convert them, so choose wisely.
6 ) Does it need to survive fire/flood/tornado? If so you pretty much only have one choice.
7 ) Have you considered online backup? If your needs are modest, you can get a decent amount of storage from many online vendors, but your home network will need to be able to shove that much data back and forth in order to take advantage of it.
8 ) Does portability matter? Some boxes need to be part of a network in order to work, others might require a big wall wart or funky cable.

We can answer more questions as the thread progresses.

--Patrick
EDIT: Full disclosure, I use a 1TB G-Drive mini external for my away missions (such as the one I'm on now), but I have a 2-disk 2TB RAID-1 at home for the stuff I don't want to disappear.

burning to CD-R will last 25-50 years? Are you mixing it up with "real" CDs? I used to use CD-Rs for storage ad literally not one of them is still in perfect order after 10 years or less. In a dust-free, closed environment (some temperature changes, admittedly, but nothing serious). CD-RWs are especially horrible (they don't last 5 years), but even CD-R isn't exactly "permanent". I'd easily go for an SSD or Flash solution for longevity - though you'd be best of to actually use them occasionally and, of course, ahve several copies, always.

That aside, I also have nothing but good experiences with My Passport Essential drives, 500GB and 1TB. Those both still work flawlessly despite heavy bumps and being lugged all over and having plenty of stuff written and read; other brands I've tried didn't use to last as long, though it's been a while.

Externals are good, but be sure to have the data in two places, like others have said. But I have lost 2 externals at home to device failure, and one at the office. But I have several dozen across my agency in the last couple of years and only lost one.

I have the WD usb 3.0 small form factor drives now, and I don't have any complaints yet.

I can't wait until I can afford SSD.

I'd also just go Dropbox. Much easier and less prone to failure.

Bubble181 said:

burning to CD-R will last 25-50 years? Are you mixing it up with "real" CDs?

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Nope. The trouble with most people is that they burn CDs at the fastest speed possible. If you want it to last, you clean the CD, you burn it at the lowest speed possible, and you keep it out of sunlight. Also, CDs are cheap. You should burn two copies.

--Patrick

I'd be surprised if even an external HDD lasted 25-50 years, personally, never mind a CD.

Not to mention you need to have an optical drive that's still working 25-50 years later.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Not to mention you still have to have an optical drive that's still working 25-50 years later.

--Patrick

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I don't even have an optical drive NOW.

As an aside, Sony or somebody needs to spend more time working on modern optical media or something. Right now there's no really good method for archival storage (that doesn't entail actually printing documents onto paper), which is making it hard for people like hospitals to maintain decent long-term records. There are some semi-exotic solutions involving magnetic disks and ZFS or Btrfs, but sadly there's currently no commercial "home" version of these technologies for people who just don't want to lose stuff.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

As an aside, Sony or somebody needs to spend more time working on modern optical media or something. Right now there's no really good method for archival storage (that doesn't entail actually printing documents onto paper), which is making it hard for people like hospitals to maintain decent long-term records. There are some semi-exotic solutions involving magnetic disks and ZFS or Btrfs, but sadly there's currently no commercial "home" version of these technologies for people who just don't want to lose stuff.

--Patrick

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Magnetic tapes are still a good option for businesses to keep low-traffic/archival records, no? It's true that there isn't much for accessible to home consumers though, other than cloud.

Denbrought said:

Magnetic tapes are still a good option for businesses to keep low-traffic/archival records, no? It's true that there isn't much for accessible to home consumers though, other than cloud.

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Yes, magnetic tape is still the most economical way to store backups, but its lack of longevity makes it unsuitable for long-term storage.
Sad as it might seem, the storage we have right now that's most resistant to degradation is either printed paper or film.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Yes, magnetic tape is still the most economical way to store backups, but its lack of longevity makes it unsuitable for long-term storage.
Sad as it might seem, the storage we have right now that's most resistant to degradation is either printed paper or film.

--Patrick

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Interesting! I hadn't realized they had an average shelf life of 10-20, now that I looked it up. I used to shred boxes and boxes of it (after cracking the shells and unspooling it by hand), I don't miss that particular job hah.

In reality one needs to update their equipment every 6 years. Then move the data to new storage devices. It is difficult to keep anything on one device and expect it to last much past 5 years with out some form of failure, or obsolescence.

this thread is probably the most complicated answer to a simple question that this board has ever seen.

sixpackshaker said:

In reality one needs to update their equipment every 6 years. Then move the data to new storage devices. It is difficult to keep anything on one device and expect it to last much past 5 years with out some form of failure, or obsolescence.

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This is generally what I advise people to do.
1) Move to stable modern storage as technology changes.
2) Make multiple copies in case one dies, and don't store them together.

I work in end-user support, but this is the same advice I would give to anyone, whether enterprise-level or just mom+baby pics. If you care about it at all, keep it current and redundant and redundant.[DOUBLEPOST=1431023934,1431023828][/DOUBLEPOST]

GasBandit said:

this thread is probably the most complicated answer to a simple question that this board has ever seen.

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We're known for having opinions. Personally, I hate losing data. No, I detest/loathe/abhor losing data.

--Patrick

GasBandit said:

this thread is probably the most complicated answer to a simple question that this board has ever seen.

Click to expand...

Steaks and comic characters in movies?

Officer_Charon said:

Looking to pic one up for photo storage for my wife. Doesn't need to be stellar, doesn't need to be huge, just needs to be reliable and sturdy. Any ideas? Any brands to stay away from?

Click to expand...

If hitachi is available, get that. If not, western digital, anything 2 tbytes or below. Expect to need to copy it over to new media every 2 or 3 years.

/thread

No, we need to teach him what to look for in a hard drive.
If he was just looking for a product recommendation, he would've gone to PC Mag's website or something rather than coming here.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

No, we need to teach him what to look for in a hard drive.
If he was just looking for a product recommendation, he would've gone to PC Mag's website or something rather than coming here.

--Patrick

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I'm pretty sure the situation is the exact opposite of that.

GasBandit said:

If hitachi is available, get that. If not, western digital, anything 2 tbytes or below. Expect to need to copy it over to new media every 2 or 3 years.

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By the way @Officer_Charon , this is good advice. Not so sure about the "2TB or lower" part, and I'm not a fan of the older USB MyBook enclosures, but this is probably the same route I would take through the external HDD landscape. Only thing to add is no matter what bundled backup software comes on the drive, don't use it. I have yet to see any bundled-by-the-drive-company stuff that was worthwhile for more than just updating the drive firmware or something.

Also, if you want 6TB of solid state storage in a 2.5" form factor, Fixstars has a drive for you, but they don't say what the price is...probably because if you have to ask, you can't afford it/it's not for you anyway.

--Patrick