pocket drive choice

[mcfoto]

Hi
We are going to get another drive & I know WD but has anyone had any experience with Buffalo 320 or 500 GB portable drives? Good or Bad.
Thanks Denis

[Kumar]

I've had a couple of older powered Buffalo drives for about 5 years now, and they're still chugging along - touch wood!

Kumar

[william]

Just had my 2nd crash with a western digital passport drive. (my first one crashed 6 months after I bought it, they sent me a replacement, now it's crashed 3 weeks after I received it. I'd heard so many good things about reliability of WD drives but that definitely has not been my experience.

I've had a couple of older powered Buffalo drives for about 5 years now, and they're still chugging along - touch wood!

Kumar

[ddk]

Over the years, been very happy with several LaCie drives and customer service.

[digitaldog]

G-Tech Mini are awesome (I have three). http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-mini.cfm They run cool, look great, fast and rock solid. Not at all impressed with the WD I have. Its OK but nothing special.

[Bonobo]

G-Tech Mini are awesome (I have three). http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-mini.cfm They run cool, look great, fast and rock solid. Not at all impressed with the WD I have. Its OK but nothing special.

Ill second that, never had a good experience with WD, now have 3 G-Tech, all rock solid.

[Pete_G]

I'll third the vote for G-Tech. They're more expensive but worth the extra, who wants a HD that dies after a few months. WD and all the other cheap drives are pretty poor IMHO, useful to buy if your sending files or video abroad as a one off, but no good for backing up valuable stuff over time. The G-Tech drives come with built in weird Mac only formatting, if your on Windows you need to google around for advice on how to re-format to NTFS.

[Jeremy Payne]

The G-Tech drives come with built in weird Mac only formatting, if your on Windows you need to google around for advice on how to re-format to NTFS.

Another happy GTech customer ... on Windows (Vista and 7).  I'm pretty sure that I just plugged mine into my Vista laptop and windows recognized it needed formatting ... wasn't a big deal as I recall.

[Pete_G]

Another happy GTech customer ... on Windows (Vista and 7).  I'm pretty sure that I just plugged mine into my Vista laptop and windows recognized it needed formatting ... wasn't a big deal as I recall.

It happened to me on two different G-Tech drives, they didn't come up under Win XP and were reported as having a GPT Protective Partition, normal formatting tools would not work and I had to run some commands with DISKPART, then all was fine. It's probable that this is not a problem with Vista/W7 but I was using XP at the time.

[archivue]

LACIE rugged is good for you !

[Jeremy Payne]

I also have a Toshiba 320gb 7200rpm 2.5" drive that I like a lot.

http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=Stor...MKxx54GSYSeries

I bought it as an external drive.

[Ken Bennett]

I have a bunch of external drives from OWC, both large powered drives and the smaller bus-powered models. No problems in years of use. (So far.)

[wolfnowl]

This is rather impressive (although not recommended): http://www.g-technology.com/userstories/mangled/

Mike.

[jimgolden]

all drives fail at some point I found - small drives seem to be worse IMO -  rocstor have been terrible. I like lacie rugged.

[Jonathan Wienke]

I've had a couple of older powered Buffalo drives for about 5 years now, and they're still chugging along - touch wood!

Whenever I do that, this happens:

[Kumar]

I forgot about American slang  

[mcfoto]

Hi
Thank you all

[mtomalty]

I've had a G-drive mini for a year now with no incident but I also have two blue Lacie Rugged that are over 4 years old and two orange Lacie Rugged
that are over 2 years old with not a hint of a problem.

From my experience the portables are a safer bet than the desktops as I've had a raft of Lacies die and out of 4 new 1TB G-Drives have had
two die within weeks of loading them.


Mark
www.marktomalty.com