I keep an external hard drive at the office as offsite backup and to hold my music library. Well, my WD mybook gave up the other day.

Suggestions for cheap, quiet, reliable?

I like to ask you guys to shop for me.

Many thanks.

Tom. Most consumer drives are quiet, cheap and reliable. The noisiest will be high performance/fast drives. Stay away from those and you will be OK.

If you want the most quiet for your $, go to silentpcreview.com and take a look at their ratings.

I think I just got a Western Digital "Elements" external storage drive with not all the crap autobackup software that comes on most of them. Cheap and lots of storage.

Tom, how big a drive do you need? I seem to have 8~10 externals floating around...mostly Maxtors in the 200~300GB range.

I picked up x2 Toshiba 1TB 2.5 portable USB drives for my uncles server backups. They seem to work fine. I like their enclosures, small with rubber edge, feels solid.

They don't make em anymore but perhaps there is a newer model of them out.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149103

I've had externals on a couple of occasions. The drives themselves seem okay, if a little slow due to the interfaces I've had for them, but the enclosures have developed problems that killed them. I think the ventilation on one of them wasn't designed too well, and I can't remember what broke too easily on the other.

I haven't needed to transport that much data anywhere for a while, but I just use internal drives with a hard drive dock (I have this one right now) if the need arises. It's not pretty, and it's not quiet, but it serves my purposes better than the normal external setup.

If you're going to be transporting it around, I'd look at getting something more rugged than the cheapos, but I'm really not sure what the options are for that. Probably more than you want to spend.

I've gone though a couple WD drives (IE: they died a silent death). I've had a Seagate Free Agent for years without a single hiccup. So either the Seagate is more reliable, or I just got lucky with it, for once.

I have been using Seagate drives in my NAS - I had one failure within a couple of months of purchase, but since that one was replaced under warranty I have been problem free for at least 3 years. In fact just checked my NAS status and it has been continuously up for 127 days, 14 hours and 25 minutes as of this post. I use the DLink DNS 323 in RAID1 configuration - separate backup to a single drive stored offsite is supposed to be done monthly, but realistically is done semi annually.

Not external, but I use Seagate drives exclusively at home and work. There's probably about 50 spinning around me somewhere. I had one out of all of those start to grow bad blocks about a week after install, and one other stop spinning after 1.5 years (2 year warranty on this SAS model). Both replaced without fuss, for $9 Seagate even cross-shipped replacements, with a return carton.

+1 Seagate so far. Although I'm not religious about buying them. My last internal drive was a WD just because of the sale at the time.

Alrighty! That's what I'm talking about!

It seems like the only drives I've ever had fail are WD, so I was looking for "try brand x".

Mark, I don't know. I'm using a 500GB now and there's plenty of space. I think I have 300-400GB of all content, but it would be pretty easy for me to split it into a pictures disk and a music disk.

Thanks, guys. I appreciate the help.

Just to be clear, my Seagate's are internal SATA drives, just plugged (docked) into the NAS enclosure. I may be wrong, but the difference to me between 'internal' vs 'external' drives is not the drive itself, but simply what it is plugged into.

I forgot I have two Seagate 500GB external drives. When I back up my PS3 the drive gets pounded for 12 hours non-stop, and other than getting a little warm it's not had any problems. Indeed it's just one of their 2.5 inch laptop drives inside a USB enclosure.

My experience over the last 15+ years is I see way more Seagate drives fail than WD. I'm looking at a bad Seagate drive right now.

/shrug

this program gives good info on the health of HDD:
http://www.hdtune.com/

Weirdest thing - a day after posting about the Seagate drives, I got a Seagate advertisement email for this device which might be kinda cool for tablet users. The weird part is I don't recall ever getting spam from Seagate until I posted about them....they're watching you!

Tom, any luck finding one? Still shopping around?