Well, my 1TB hard drive has almost filled up, so I'm looking for another drive, but I don't know much about hard drives.

I found a "Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB Portable Hard Drive " for $160 and a "Seagate 2TB 3.5" Port Expansion Desktop Hard Drive" for $138. So the cheaper one has twice the amount of space I'm guessing thats mainly due to the fact that its a desktop hard drive, which shouldn't be a problem since my 1TB is portable and I doubt I'll need more than that on the move. But what is important for me is reliability, and speed. Being a desktop drive I think that the 2TB one would be better, but since its cheaper I'm not sure, and I'm not sure if Western Digital is better (my current one is Seagate, works ok).

What I'd also like to know is whether USB3 is always backwards compatible with USB2 (since I haven't yet got USB3, and the 2TB hard drive has 3.0). I suppose they wouldn't yet make external drives without USB2.0 support.


Well thats my questions. To put it simply: does price=quality, is Western Digital better than Seagate, and is desktop better than portable, in external hard drives.

I bought a Western Digital My Book Essentials 2TB drive for around $100 from a local retailer. Its got USB3 and its a desktop drive, so the speeds are still nice.

USB3 is backwards compatible with USB2 and it should work with USB1.0 as well, although I haven't tested it. Obviously the drive will perform better when connected to a USB 3 host though.

Do NOT get a Seagate. Those things tend to die if you look at them wrong. Western Digital is a good company.

Ok, so 2TB one is good. I suppose I can't really get USB3 until next year maybe, my PCs running ok, so I don't know when I'll buy a new one, USB3, bluray and Windows 8 are things to look forward to though.



Thats what I was thinking, I've had my Seagate for about a year, and it runs ok, but it feels a bit cheap



So I shall buy the Western Digital one. 2TB cheaper than 1TB, awesome!


EDIT: Just realised that my father had a 1TB Western Digital hard drive, and it died suddently for apparently no reason. When you plug it in it just doesn't do anything, light goes on, but not like its supposed to. But that might just be a random fail, and not related to Western Digital, but thats why I hesitated with the 2TB one, its cheaper, and I've seen one fail.

My grandparents have had the same Western Digital 2 TB MyBook for....I wanna say five years. Never had a fail, never had data issues, nothing. So I think whatever happened to your dad's thing was a fluke.

Yeah probably was (luckily dad had set it up to be synced with a HP 2TB drive, so we didn't loose anything). Did they have USB3 5 years ago. Well, I get the point though, I've always though Western Digital was a reliable company (until the failure), and you guys have reassured me, so I'll buy that one. Thanks for the help folks.