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External Hard Drive advice

dibblebill

dibblebill

Android Expert
I'm looking for an external hard drive, and I have a few strict requirements, and a few loose wants.

Required:
>1TB
-WiFi equipped


Wanted:
USB 3.0, will accept 2.0, just in case
<$200 (USD)

Any suggestions? Newegg has only a single 1Tb wifi equipped drive and I was wondering if any of you have suggestions.
 
Yeah, pretty much, i suspect it's without a drive, but I can buy a 1TB 2.5" drive here for less than
 
Tbh it totally depends on what your needs are, a fully loaded NAS box alone can be pretty expensive ($200+ for a 2 bay) if you can live with something like a 2 bay icybox with a couple of drives inside as a JBOD then it should work out cheaper. Not so good for access though, as it will need the pc to be on when you need access and then you have to share the drives. With a NAS is pretty much plug and play, built in servers and remote management, RAID 0,1,5,5+1 etc so you can have data redundancy if needed.

All depends on your needs fella.
 
Well, here's what I'll be doing with it: Storing backups on it, storing music (various formats, typically 256kb/s or less), and accessing the above via wifi from either my tablet, phone, laptop, desktop, or other computers in the house.
 
Well, the issue I'm sseeing with many is that the CPU is consumed by media detectors (WD, Seagate), just too weak (Seagate and many smaller bands), etc. And My issue is, I'll be using it to directly access and play my mp3 library. I may have to cave and just get another USB based drive.
 
Why must it be WiFi? You should be OK with anything that plugs into your network as it will then be accessible from the WiFi devices.
 
I have the older version of this. I just throw files, music, videos, etc on it. My only complaint about mine is I can't save torrents directly to it (gives an error) but I think that's a limitation of uTorrent. The one linked above says you can use it for that so...
 
To clarify.

There are two main ways this can be done.

Cheaper

1) have an 'always on' pc/laptop with a shared external drive or icybox (or equivalent) this will indeed serve as you want, and you can remote login to control the 'server' but you have the ongoing cost of powering the 'server' and external drive / enclosure (my 2 bay 3.5" icybox needed its own PSU)

Not so cheap

2) use a dedicated NAS box with one or two drives, two + gives you data redundancy option in the form of RAID at least mirroring the contents of one drive onto another. Add to that all the usual NAS benifits. The power consumption would be substantially lower than having an 'always on' server if you take a typical low end desktop at 350W, laptop at 60W, my 4 bay NAS uses less than 40W (might evan be 18-30W) so running costs will end up saving you cash in the long run.

3) if backups weren't in the profile, you could just aim for a media server as it will be low power and still network connectivity / broadcast
 
Thanks. I'll look into those. Backup isn't a big issue- I generally replace drives before they fail and have secondary data storage somewhere at any given time, but I'll consider it. Save up a few months longer and I can just get a nice 2-drive RAID system.
 
IMO i wouldnt buy ANY harddrive if it wasnt a Western Digital. not sure if they have a drive that meets your requirements (they probably do) but i would steer clear of anything but wd hdds :) just my 2 cents :)
 
A word of warning to those here: NEVER buy any LenovoEMC products. EVer. This device is slow, unreliable, and the company completely helpless to solve issues. I can honestly say I've never owned a Lenovo device of ANY type that worked like it was supposed to.
 
Lenovo, imo is just cheap crap. Also personally i've slightly gone off WD drives after an 8 month old Scorpio blue failed on me. Samsung and Maxtor however, have never done me wrong.
 
XplosiV said:
Lenovo, imo is just cheap crap. Also personally i've slightly gone off WD drives after an 8 month old Scorpio blue failed on me. Samsung and Maxtor however, have never done me wrong.
Click to expand...

I've learned my lesson. TWO work Lenovo laptopsh ave broken down on me, touchpads and screens, within a year.
 
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