External Hard Drives

Which one?

[JoshS]

I'm looking to buy an external hard drive to back up my digital pictures and other misc. files. Is there one brand that is better than others? As of now, I'm looking at:

Western Digital 320GB
Maxtor (similar capacity)
Desk Hammer Express 320GB-500GB

The Desk Hammer Express 500GB is comparable in price with the others after rebates. Anyone know anything about this brand?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[zeus]

well I got a Lacie it got a great design and i never had an trouble, the design is from Porsche.

[kaled]

In my experience, Maxtor are reliable (but I have no specific knowledge of external drives).

I've never heard of Desk Hammer. Who's drive is actually in the box?

Kaled.

[JoshS]

Desk Hammer is made by Bell Microproducts, I guess. Don't know much else about it.

Lacie was another option.

[The Contractor]

best bet is to buy an enclosure and stick your own drive in it.

I have a WD Netcenter 250GB (network) that I cannot stand since it runs some version of Linux and you cannot format or partition the drive without using their utilities/interface and I find it really slow.

An older ACOM 160GB (firewire/USB2)that's OK.

I also have two drives in enclosures (both 160GB Samsung) that run USB2 and these are what I prefer.

I would like to find a really fast network drive ( I have GB router and ethernet) so I'm thinking of the D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure which offers both RAID 0 and RAID1 options along with a built-in USB print server which would be great for the seldom used wide-carriage epson inkjet I have.