External Hard Drives - Dime a dozen?

Bleedred

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Feb 21, 2001
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Boston, MA
My son is off to college in the Fall and he never backed up his computer. We plan to get him an external hard drive, but wanted to know if they are all the same or not. Thoughts?
 

Scott Cooper's Grand Slam

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Jul 12, 2008
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New England

Harry Hooper

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Jan 4, 2002
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From the early 2017 report by Backblaze, the 4 TB drives {except for one Seagate model in particular} are pretty reliable across the manufacturers.

LINK

Best Buy is offering deals on many of its WD external drives right now, with both a low price and a $20 gift card included if you have a BB rewards account.

Example1

Example2
 

dbn

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Feb 10, 2007
7,785
La Mancha.
I bought a Mac Airport Time Capsule a few years ago. It's got plenty of storage space, doubles as a wireless router, and will do backups automatically. I've been happy with it.
 

Couperin47

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They are all either made by Seagate or WD (or it's subsidiaries HGST/Toshiba). They all come with 1,2 or a few 3 yr warranties for only slightly different money, buy one with a 2 or 3 yr warranty. The Toshiba/HGST drives use a sightly better mechanical build than the WD drives and are my preference and spend a few bucks more for a retail boxed drive rather than a bulk drive as both Amazon or Newegg don't pack bulk drives as well as they should. The sweet spot for size/value are 2 TB drives.
 
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