I'm thinking about getting an external harddrive because I like to keep big files and backups conveniently in one place. But I never bought one before so I'm not too sure where to start.

For those who have some experience with the things:
-what's a good company for external harddrives? What did you get, and are you happy?
-those that are marketed as very "portable," are they good? I would like to carry one around, and it will get some bumps along the way, but I assume that's no real problem?
-if it fails internally, data recovery is quite possible, no?

Just buy an enclosure and a regular hard drive, it's usually cheaper.

the very portable ones are okay, but for any kind of size expensive.

and external HDDs are just internal drives in a housing. so data recovery is as possible as it is with an internal drive.

in fact sometimes, its cheaper to buy an OEM internal and a compatible enclosure. (not always but sometimes.)

also, as far as prefabs, i've had good experience with iomega, and Western Digital has a line of them out too.

Western Digital makes some solid externals.

I havent looked recently, but I think its still true-

The very portable external drives (IE powered by USB alone) are significantly slower because they are usually based off 5400 rpm laptop drives.

If the external drive requires its own power source then chances are its a standard desktop drive running at 7200 rpm.

What Triscuit said -- usually, the small, USB-powered ones are 2.5" laptop drives and the bigger ones that require you to plug into the outlet are standard desktop drives in an enclosure.

I have a Seagate FreeAgent 500GB and it's served me well, but I've heard some complaints about how its power-saving "turn off after no 'activity' for a few minutes" feature is annoying if you want to boot off of it (I have Ubuntu installed on it) and leave your computer for a while it'll just turn off and then your session gets bonked.

If you have an eSata port on your computer, getting a drive with eSata is worth it.

Check SlickDeals for some good deals ... recently there were some pretty decent 1TB deals for around $100 with eSata.

One time I bought a "external" HDD from Maxtor (which uses seagate drives) well after a year of owning it, the board on the case was stuck in sleep mode so I had to rip it apart and now I have a 200gig internal that I paid $160 for

I have a LaCie 1 TB that I bought a couple years ago; it's not as big as it used to be but it still comes in handy, and it's never failed on me.

I've had nothing but bad experiences with off-brand drive enclosures, though. They don't provide ventilation, or any sort of decent shock protection for the drives. One of the cheaper ones I bought actually managed to somehow fry the driver board on the drive itself. That's 300 gigs that I never got back

.

I got a WD My Book at Christmas. 250GB, and I'm happy with it.

No idea how much it cost, tho'.

I bought an Acomdata (IDs itself as a WD) 1Tb USB/firewire drive sometime last year for just under 100 bucks. It works great.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136175

I have this exact one, except it is not glossy nor was it as cheap.

I also have a Lacie drive. It's more than half a TB and only cost me € 79,-
Been running steady for a couple of years now. I'm thinking about getting a second one (after all you don't have any data unless you have it twice), and you can get a TB or two for not too much money these days.

Yep. Hard drives: fast, cheap, still a better investment for mass storage than SSDs. Buy lots!

Though I'd avoid Seagate for a while, until they get their firmware problems sorted out.

I've got a 250GB FreeAgent, and like Pommy mentioned the repeated power down is annoying. The USB controller kinda crapped out after 6-8 months though, and I just removed it from the enclosure and have it internal now.

Yeah, which is a shame, because normally I would recommend Seagate before Western Digital. :saddowns: