I could use some help deciding on an external hard drive to pick up here in the near future. Just looking for some suggestions from some of you here that are more familiar with that area.

Looking for around 500gb capacity, possibly more/less depending on the deal and reliability for long term use. Also looking to spend no more than a 100 bucks, cheaper would be nice, but I don't want to sacrifice reliability like I stated above. It will mainly be used to store pictures and music, possibly some video in the future if I ever get around to uploading all my skateboarding footage off my miniDV cc.

Western Digital seems to be on top of their game from what I've read/seen...but it always seems like everything you read/review on the internet is biased. Hard to make a good decision.

Ready? Set. GO!

I contributed to the Wiki.

I picked up a 1TB WD external from Bestbuy for 89.99 a few months back.

Pretty much any off-the-shelf external unit is going to suit your needs. WD & Seagate are pretty much all you're going to find at a brick and mortar. For 500GB you're looking at between $65-$85 depending on features.

Now if you want to all but guarantee your disk never fails, I would suggest one of Kingston's HyperX or OCZ's Enyo series external SSD's; (If you can sacrifice some of the disk real estate you originally wanted) as those can be had for around $120 for a 64GB unit. Wouldn't be ideal for video storage, but pics, documents, etc... It should be fine.

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If you get emails from staples or office max. Once a month, they have coupons for 5 to 20% off. 89 for 1tb good deal, but with the coupon disount you could get it cheaper. That if bestbuy has coupons like staples. Best to do a price comparison.

Give tigerdirect a try also.

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Thanks for the help so far guys. I have been looking on NewEgg a little bit. I like them because I usually get 1day shipping due to the location of their warehouse.

Perhaps I'll hold off until SSD's are a bit cheaper/more capacity.

I contributed to the Wiki.

If you want reliability, steer away from SSD's. They are meant for one thing and one thing only... speed. Since they have no moving parts, you would think that they would last longer, but that's not always the case. For one thing, solid state flash chips have a limited P/E (program/erase) cycle lifetime before the chips lose the ability to retain information reliably. Granted, with normal light usage this is the least of your worries. The real problem is that when an SSD dies, there is usually absolutely no warning and data recovery is generally not an option. One day your drive just disappears. At least with traditional hard drives, you usually have warning signs like SMART errors, increased number of bad sectors, slow R/W times, etc. and if the drive does fail, most of the time, at least part of your data can be recovered fairly easily. Since SSD technology is way more expensive per GB than traditional drives, your money would be better spent buying multiple hard drives and putting them in an external RAID enclosure.

Anyone know anyone who can help me tune this in the Pittsburgh area (Greensburg)?

1TB Western Digital external drive - $70 shipped from Newegg

use promo code: WEDI430

http://tinyurl.com/86oeg7r

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