Requirements:
Is there a decent SSD that doesn't cost 4 times as much as an HDD? Or is there a good HDD that doesn't fall apart when you look at it crosseyed?
I think you can guess what happened yesterday 
I use Western digital passports. Currently running 2 of them, one for the Xbox and one for the tv. Dead nuts reliable, although I don't transport them much. Cheap too, think I paid 75 for the first 1tb then 100 a year later for the 2tb.
USB powered with that fancy micro usb/mini hdmi plug thing Samsung was using on their phones for a while.
This one is used frequently for transporting files to and from work. I have tried some cloud-based things, but they either cost as much as an external HD, or they don't work well between my Win10 at home and my Vista at work.
Plus, some of the stuff I do is a bit sensitive and although clouds are pretty secure, I don't want stuff getting "borrowed."
I use passports to back up my server. One is in my bag all the time and never had an issue with them.
curtis73 wrote: - darn near shock proof (tired of losing HDs when you sneeze on them or they fall 3" off a shelf)
LOL, by hard drive standards, that's like saying "Tired of wrecking cars when you sneeze on them or slam them into a wall at 80kph" 
The only real shockproof option is an SSD, which is $$$$. There are hard drives with accelerometers that can park the head if they detect a fall (called Active Hard Drive Protection), but that's no guarantee the drive will survive. Hard drives are inherently fragile because of how they work.
In any case I recommend rolling your own, as in buying the disk/SSD and enclosure separately. The Vantec NexStar 3 is a good enclosure, I have a couple of them.
What you might want to consider is making your own ruggedized drive. Buy an enclosure and a hard drive, preferably one with active protection, then get a big block of soft foam and jam the whole thing into the middle of it. Just keep an eye on the heat. Voila, a hard drive that you can drop.
When I was HD shopping a while back I saw a failure rate comparison from some large business IT source. It suggested that Seagate had the highest failure rate by a wide margin, with WD a big improvement (except in the 3TB+ category), and Hitachi the best of all. I have no idea where I found it, how accurate it was, and how out-of-date it might be, but it was compelling enough to make me to buy a Hitachi HD.
02Pilot wrote: When I was HD shopping a while back I saw a failure rate comparison from some large business IT source. It suggested that Seagate had the highest failure rate by a wide margin, with WD a big improvement (except in the 3TB+ category), and Hitachi the best of all. I have no idea where I found it, how accurate it was, and how out-of-date it might be, but it was compelling enough to make me to buy a Hitachi HD.
Sounds right to me, from my experience.
Check out this hard drive. It has active protection. You'll need a 2.5" enclosure for this drive. I recommend this one.
2.5" drives tend to build less heat and they have to withstand higher operating temperatures for use in laptops. Stick all that in a big block of mattress foam and call it done.
I also have a Western Digital Passprot, 2TB. It was cheap and seems very portable. Has run flawlessly for a year as my backup drive for the autocross timing computer.
WD External HD wrapped in bubble wrap and placed in a cardboard box, with the USB cable snaking out through a hole cut in the side of the box. Effective, and very sophisticated-looking. 
Oh an interesting tidbit, I once wanted to intentionally break the platters of a 2.5" hard drive. I threw it 20ft in the air and let it hit the paved driveway. It took 3 throws before they shattered.
02Pilot wrote: When I was HD shopping a while back I saw a failure rate comparison from some large business IT source. It suggested that Seagate had the highest failure rate by a wide margin, with WD a big improvement (except in the 3TB+ category), and Hitachi the best of all. I have no idea where I found it, how accurate it was, and how out-of-date it might be, but it was compelling enough to make me to buy a Hitachi HD.
Maybe BackBlaze? They use thousands of drives in their mass storage service (73,653 drives in service as of 12/31/2016!) and do a detailed breakdown of failures. Here's 2016's:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-2016/
Also, Curtis, do you have an SSD in any of your machines? I would highly recommend trying it if not. I was a long time hold-out, and just upgraded my desktop at the office to an SSD and it felt like a completely different computer. Everything is faster, like sometimes 10x+ faster. Booting is ridiculous, but loading Word or Excel or Outlook is like a click - slight pause - done process. It feels like machines used to when software was 1/100th the size it is now. It's the single best upgrade I've ever done to a computer, and that's saying a lot.
If you go with an SSD you need to be really careful about making backups. SSDs can fail irrecoverably without warning - this is their most common failure mode in fact. With hard drives, there's usually some warning and possibility of recovery.
I put one in my gaming PC a few months ago and it made the computer maybe 10% faster...but I had a RAID0 array of 10krpm drives before the SSD 
02Pilot wrote: When I was HD shopping a while back I saw a failure rate comparison from some large business IT source. It suggested that Seagate had the highest failure rate by a wide margin, with WD a big improvement (except in the 3TB+ category), and Hitachi the best of all. I have no idea where I found it, how accurate it was, and how out-of-date it might be, but it was compelling enough to make me to buy a Hitachi HD.
Ironically, this was a Hitachi drive in a rubber-mount desktop enclosure. I tipped it over on its side and it started screaming and the heads just oscillate back and forth.
I found a buddy who sold me a Mil-spec 1TB drive (not officially Mil-spec, but supposedly it survives the same 3m drops and crush protection). I figured for $40 from a buddy it will house whatever I can salvage off the old one, then maybe I can go full-on and buy an SSD (which I want for music in the car anyway)
Ok... now the question is this: I can take the old drive to the fix-it guys and have them extract the data. I assume they take the drums out and install them in a good drive?
Is that something I can tackle at home?
curtis73 wrote: Ok... now the question is this: I can take the old drive to the fix-it guys and have them extract the data. I assume they take the drums out and install them in a good drive? Is that something I can tackle at home?
If it has a head crash or ruined bearing (the usual causes of screeching noises) it's absolutely not something you can tackle at home. A data recovery shop with a clean room may be able to get some of the data back, but it won't be cheap, it could run into the 4-digits easily.
Also I don't think you're old enough to have any reason to think computers use any kind of storage with "drums" in it
I am the IT guy at my company, recently a friend lost 5 years worth of baby pictures and videos when her 2.5" USB WD Passport drive failed (some problem with the heads).
I looked at it for a day or two, couldn't get it to do anything and feared damaging it further...
So they sent it to a drive recovery service (one of the big ones), and it had to be taken apart in a clean-room.
They got 90% of the data back, but the bill was about $2000 (they knew about the price, but really had no other options in their situation).
Wait.... I've had this done three or four times before, and it wasn't $2000. Last one was something like $130
$130 was probably for filesystem damage which is easy to recover from - that's stuff you could do at home. Could also be a board swap which is easy if you have a board library.
If they have to use the clean room the price is going to go up fast.
I guess my guys didn't use a clean room? I sat by and watched as they pulled the plates out and put them in another drive to recover it.
Guess I got lucky?
curtis73 wrote: I guess my guys didn't use a clean room? I sat by and watched as they pulled the plates out and put them in another drive to recover it. Guess I got lucky?
Wow that is incredibly risky. When a tiny mote of dust or maybe a particularly large molecule comes between the head and the platter, it creates a new head crash, and with the cover off the dust goes flying.
A few weeks back one of the programmers in our group showed us a 1.5 TB (if I recall correctly) USB thumb drive - size of a large thumbdrive. Imagine those aren't cheap...
Wife has a 1TB WD she totes back and forth to school every day. Very durable and dependable to date.
I'm an "IT guy" and from the backblaze data use HGST drives whenever I have to buy one. That said, I recently put together a USB enclosure with a Samsung 850 EVO SSD. I do my long term storage in the cloud, but wanted some more reliability from my USB HDD that I use on a daily basis and subsequently drop frequently. The performance increase so far has made it worth it without even considering the drop-ability. For what I needed in my Zalman virtual BD drive, 120GB was fine. It looks like you'd be spending nearly $400 for a 1TB though. The speed and convenience make it worthwhile for me, but for others its a hard pill to swallow.
With all of that said and data against Seagate drives: they offer a $15 data recovery plan for 3 years of use. https://www.seagaterescue.com/cart?policy=STZZ731
I would buy that for ANY seagate drive!
GameboyRMH wrote:02Pilot wrote: When I was HD shopping a while back I saw a failure rate comparison from some large business IT source. It suggested that Seagate had the highest failure rate by a wide margin, with WD a big improvement (except in the 3TB+ category), and Hitachi the best of all. I have no idea where I found it, how accurate it was, and how out-of-date it might be, but it was compelling enough to make me to buy a Hitachi HD.Sounds right to me, from my experience.
I will NEVER buy a Seagate drive. I have seen too many fail!
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