External Hard Drive for a laptop

It all depends on your level of paranoia. Risk management. How likely is it that both your main hard drive *and* that backup drive are going to fail (more or less) simultaneously? And can you live with it if it happens?

For me, I keep my work on an SD card (actually, a micro SDHC that lets me read my work on my tablet), I synch that to my primary laptop's hard drive. And then I synch that to Skydrive. Can all three go bad simultaneously? Anything is possible.

But the odds are so low that I accept the risk.

dovieb said:

Now that your external drive is working properly, it is VERY IMPORTANT that you also backup/copy every file on the Seagate to another source (removable media or cloud backup). Their drives have an alarming failure rate, and even when the drive is still under warranty, the minimum charge for data recovery starts at $600 dollars. I have replaced two, and had to use brute force to get my stuff off them when they started dying...

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Unfortunate, but AFAIK true. I don't buy Seagate drives any more. I have one Seagate external that has made too much noise for my comfort for most of its life. I don't trust it with unique files. It came with some horrible software on it, too.

Matera the Mad said:

Unfortunate, but AFAIK true. I don't buy Seagate drives any more. I have one Seagate external that has made too much noise for my comfort for most of its life. I don't trust it with unique files. It came with some horrible software on it, too.

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I have also had a Bad Seagate Experience, but this was because for some idiotic reason (and Seagate are not alone) they had designed it to stand upright on a narrow base. So of course the first time a cat jumped up on to my desk, it toppled over, and died instantly (the drive, not the cat, thank goodness.)

Don't buy an external drive that has to be stood up, is my advice.

Some data from some data storage company (I've already forgotten who) that came out recently found likewise -- the failure rate for Seagate is presently about 6 times that of Western Digital.

I've been a WD bigot for a very long time, in part because in my capacity as hardware dude dealing with the salvage that came in to our local user group, it was very plain which drives had the best survival rate: WD very good, Seagate not so good, Maxtor horrid.

Seagate quality has historically declined to the level of their acquisitions, rather than bringing it up. First that was Connor, then Maxtor...