Best external hard drive

[Henrryparth]

I'm looking for an external hard drive (probably 3-5 TB) and was just wondering what the best overall external hard drive is? I usually go for WD in my builds so I assume they would make pretty good externals too? And do externals come with USB and SATA support? Is there any sort of performance difference between an internal and external drive or are they basically identical?

[driverDave2]

External drives are generally going to be internal drives just enclosed in a casing. As far as "best" drive, there's not a lot of ways to measure that, as there's not a lot of differences or features that are going to make much of a difference. (i.e. it's not like choosing a smartphone or automobile or girlfriend.)

Obviously there's a difference between HDD and SSD, or the various USB standards, or drive speed.

But what you might be most interested in is reliability/lifespan. Data storage provider Backblaze utilizes custom pods consisting of dozens of standard consumer HDDs for their storage, and therefore collects quite a bit of data regarding the performance of various models. They publish Hard Drive Stats reports each quarter, detailing the failure rates of the hard drives in their data centers. Here’s the most recent report for Q3 2018 and here’s everything since they started.

[fzabkar]

I would purchase a separate desktop HDD and external enclosure rather than the prepackaged ones from Seagate or WD. The latter are plastic hotboxes, plus most of WD's and Toshiba's 2.5" models have an integrated USB port on the HDD's PCB rather than a separate bridge board. When choosing an external enclosure, I would go for one with an aluminium casing and fan. An eSATA port would be a nice thing to have, and perhaps firewire as well.

[LoboX]

I would purchase a separate desktop HDD and external enclosure rather than the prepackaged ones from Seagate or WD. The latter are plastic hotboxes, plus most of WD's and Toshiba's 2.5" models have an integrated USB port on the HDD's PCB rather than a separate bridge board. When choosing an external enclosure, I would go for one with an aluminium casing and fan. An eSATA port would be a nice thing to have, and perhaps firewire as well.

^^^^This.

[Jidis]

fzabkar & LoboX-

That sounds interesting. Do you have a particular box you like which isn't terribly expensive? I was going to grab another 4TB external soon and may try that. Oddly, it looks like the raw 3.5's run about what I paid for the last 4TB external WD. Those enclosures must really be cheap.

Merry Christmas!

[LoboX]

fzabkar & LoboX-

That sounds interesting. Do you have a particular box you like which isn't terribly expensive? I was going to grab another 4TB external soon and may try that. Oddly, it looks like the raw 3.5's run about what I paid for the last 4TB external WD. Those enclosures must really be cheap.

Merry Christmas!

Any external enclosure will do just fine, just remember to have different types of connections like @fzabkar said.

Cheers.

[fzabkar]

Years ago I saw a Startech box with USB 2.0 and eSATA, but AFAIR the USB bridge firmware was limited to 2TB. I think Rosewill made similar boxes, including firewire. That said, if you stick with eSATA, then capacity would not be an issue.

These days I can't seem to find anything that isn't ridiculously expensive and which supports USB 3.0, eSATA and 2TB+ capacities. One other thing to be aware of is that some bridge firmware is configured for a sector size of 4KB rather than 512B, so that would cause problems if you later wished to connect the drive as an internal. This would not be an issue for eSATA.

[LoboX]

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Ext ... X863MKEZ9H

Verify this one.

[Jidis]

One other thing to be aware of is that some bridge firmware is configured for a sector size of 4KB rather than 512B, so that would cause problems if you later wished to connect the drive as an internal.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I was considering going 2-piece. My largest current WD does a variety of weirdness which would probably render the drive inside useless if the enclosure circuitry ever fails.

I guess I've been lucky on these junk enclosures though. I've got a few large capacity ones which have run for years and I haven't had any of that stuff break since back in the IDE days. There's even one here that's eSATA,FW, and USB3.0. The times I've run it eSATA though, it seemed just like an internal drive on a long cable (you couldn't hot plug or anything). I like to boot them up only as I need them.

Thanks