External HDD confusion

[MikeM]

Last year I looked at some user reviews of external hard drives. All
brands had their supporters as I expected but overall the My Books
seemed to me to get the thumbs up. Maxtor drives seemed to get the
thumbs down and a number of reviews recommended avoiding them, and the
Seagate FreeAgent drives seemed to get a high number of bad reviews.

Just now I looked at the latest user reviews and it seems My Book now
gets a lot of bad, or not too good reviews. Several said that when
they crash all data is lost. On one site most of the Maxtor reviews
got 5 out of 5, and FreeAgent got better reviews than last time I
looked. I kmow some drives of all brands crash after a short time but
more seemed to be mentuined for My Book than with the ofther brands

Has somethimng changed with Maxtor and My Book drives? Are My Book
drives recently that crash harder to recover data from than other
drives?

Thanks
Mike

 

[pcbldrNinetyEight]

Has somethimng changed with Maxtor and My Book drives? Are My Book
drives recently that crash harder to recover data from than other
drives?

If by crash you mean mechanical problem then I know of no magnet drive
that is easy to recover data from after such a crash. Recommend you use
DVD burner to back up your most important personal data at regular
intervals.

 

[MikeM]

The backup drive is for digital photos.I used DVDs for the photos I
took on an overseas trip in 2006, so not likely to be replaceable,
and when I needed to retrieve some of the backup files they were
corrupted. I check the DVDs I used, a lot because I had thousands of
photos, and found that everyone of them had developed faults. I didn't
use any cut-price disks.

The other reason is that I was accumulating a stack of plastic storage
boxes packed with disks. I take a lot of photos and back up in TIF and
RAW formats.

I found that the only disks that hadn't formed bad patches were RWs,
the opposite of what everyone I spoke to told me. At the cost of
brands like TDK the HD worked out cheaper. It also makes life a lot
easier when I can search thousands of files instead of looking through
individual disks.

Mike