A couple of years ago (about 3-4 years ago), I bought my first external hard drive (portable Freecom with 40GB of storage) which was one of the first models to be released. It failed in 8 months, and caused me to lose 20GB of music as well as important documents and other valuable data. At the time I figured "it must be a dodgy brand, or external hard drives were too premature then to work properly".
Now fast forward three years or so to June/July 2009. I checked different manufacturers, different models and reviews of drives with capacity ranging from 80GB to 1TB and pretty much on each drive, someone posted about an internal disk fault. This got me quite worried, but because lots of users off Amazon and other websites recommended this drive, I decided to save up and give it a go. Seeing so many positive reviews about this drive (well over 70), I decided that the external hard drives must have improved in reliability and (obviously) capacity since then and decided to give external hard drives one more go and went for the FULL SIZED 3.5" hard drive, which I thought would have better reliability then the portable 2.5" drives and bought this one.
This has to be the biggest mistake I ever made.
The drive arrived end-June/beginning of July time. First impressions of the drive were excellent. The drive has a nice metal case as well as rubber supporters at each end of the drive, a light power supply and a USB cable with a tiny USB connection end. The casing of the external hard drive was pretty much scratch proof as any scratches could be wiped away by merely rubbing it. The only disadvantage I found in this hard drive was the fact that it is NOT backwards compatible with USB 1.1 ports. Other than that it seemed (on the outside, at least) like a high quality product. Quick formatted it to NTFS with no problems and transferred just over 400GB of data on it to backup my desktop's files and defragmented it. Two weeks later the problems started. After one day connecting the drive to my computer, it suddenly didn't see it formatted nor did it see the name I gave it. It was displayed as a Local Disk instead of 'BACKUP DRIVE' (which was what I called it) and reported it had 0 of 0 bytes free. I decided it was some sort of problem with the NTFS file system (as it fragments very quickly, as I found out after doing some research on the problem), so I wiped it clean and re-formatted it to Ext2. As my laptop hard drive died shortly after, I immediately recovered about 70GB of data off it and onto this external hard drive, until I could afford another external hard disk drive to backup the data to and was saving up for another one of the exact same make. This was just over a week ago.
Today the hard drive has developed the exact same fault as my old portable drive, in fact this time it is much worse. After plugging it in, the drive started to repeatedly make the annoying scrathing sound after it tried to spin the hard drive (it continuosly tries spinning for 2-3 seconds, then made the scratching noise, then tries spinning again, then makes the scratching noise again non-stop) and the longer I left it plugged in, the more and more violent the scratching noise became until about 10 minutes later, at which point I knew it was hopeless and just pulled the plug on it. Another 70GB of data completely lost and the abysmal quality of my last drive was beaten. By 7 months...
I will be asking Amazon for a refund and I strongly suggest for anyone NOT to buy this or any other external hard drive, as I definitely know I won't buy one ever again. Instead I will buy the hard drive and the case separately, as this drive clearly had a cheap low-quality disk inside and so do pretty much all external hard disk drives. Also after checking several strongly positive reviews on Amazon and elsewhere, I realised about 90% of them were on first impressions, NOT on reliability and life spam of the hard drive.
You have been warned.Get more detail about Western Digital Elements 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - Black.
