My Two Cents on External Hard Drives

This is another one of those question someone asked me. I don't think it's really that difficult a decision on which type or brand to purchase. Perhaps I worked them often enough to be second nature in my mind. I'll keep it simple on the options to look for, unlike the Best Buy person I met awhile back who gave all sorts of suggestions; at the end of that conversation, I still did not make a decision the type of drive to buy.

I have brought these three brands of external hard drive so I'll give you my experience and what I think is the best so far. The first is the Seagate brand, then Western Digital, and finally Maxtor. The specification I look for are RPM (drive speed), usually the faster the better. Most of these drive run at 7200 RPM, so pick drives that are 7200 RPM and higher is a good selection. Second, make sure cooling is sufficient. So the question is how do you tell; the easiest way for me is looking at the design of the external drive cover. Do the cover seems to give sufficient ventilation? Is it a metal of plastic cover? I believe a metal type of cover disperse heat better than plastic, but it gets really hot. Oh, by the way, a feature I noticed on some drives will help is automatically shut off when you shutdown your computer. Very neat feature.

So far my Seagate lasted longer than my Western Digital. I had a Western Digital failure a while back and good things it's within the year of warranty. Definitely no Maxtor, I had really bad experience with these brand. I had two in the past and they both "crashed" on me and recovering data was a pain. I would recommend going with Seagate which I brought two years ago and it's have not giving me any problem yet. The recent Western Digital are not too bad also, they have incorporate the automatic shutdown feature which I like alot. There you have it.
I hope my opinion is easy to understand, I don't want to throw all the technical jargon's which is easy but it leave you with a "so" what question. Here are two sites I check for prices on drives and other items: www.pricewatch.com and www.slickdeals.net