[littledrawe]

...For under $100.00??

[ma-ledezma]

Toshiba HD are as good as Seagate and Western Digital, but cheaper. I do have all 3 brands and I don't see any difference in performance.

[Miguel]

While all brands are competitive quality wise, certain models from each are dogs. I advise that you read reviews from 2-4 online retailers and half-take that as being accurate. A cheap large hard drive will perform more slowly than a pricier one. That may not matter to your requirements.

M

[jerryleejr]

Also a lot of drives are the same make just rebadged for different companies...

JJ

[reeftool]

I recently bought a 3TB Western Digital My Book at Staples for $99. I've had very good luck with Western Digital drives. My last external, a 1TB WD My Book got filled up. It doesn't take long to fill a drive with the file sizes of our newer cameras and I shoot very little video.

[bar_foo]

One general rule that I've found from experience: for desktop use, go with an external HD with a separate power supply, rather than one that is USB powered. They tend to be quicker and more reliable. Of course if you need it to be portable, that trumps this principle. And if the drive comes FAT-formatted, reformat it with your OS's native filesystem (NTFS on Windows).

[dubsider]

which ever you choose.. buy 2 of them.. one for working and one for back up...
dont ask me why

[Mike L]

I'm going to put in a vote for buying an external HDD enclosure and sticking a Toshiba hard disk in it.

[Den]

Without some clarification as to how big of one you need, what it will be used for and connectivity type available, pretty hard to give a definitive answer.

[Eyewanders]

Not sure what you budget or size requirements are (how will it be used?)... but I am in absolutely love for this little enclosure by MyDigital... It houses the mSATA (not regular SATA) SSD of your choice (though their mSATA SSDs are the best I've used).
IT. IS. TINY! not the most amazing amount of space, but considering it's size, it's incredible. USB3 too so it's fast as heck.

MyDigitalSSD Bullet Proof USB 3.0 mSATA SSD Enclosure Adapter | MDMS-BP-USB3 | My Digital Discount

And of course, since it's SSD, it's *much* less prone to failure.

---------- Post added 04-08-14 at 10:04 AM ----------

They also have their "Pocket Vault" which is for a regular SATA SSD (not mSATA).

SSD, mSATA, 3D Scanners, Compact Flash, SDHC, SD, USB Drives and more | My Digital Discount

[littledrawe]

I'll use it mainly for photo storage so all the files don't end up on my computers hard drive. @Mike L is your idea easy to do, as I'm not a "tech guy"? Do you have a link for a product that would fit the bill so I can do a little more research?

[Eyewanders]

If you want a decent amount of free cloud storage (ala Dropbox, etc) I started using COPY about 6 months ago and love it more than dropbox. You get 15gb for the free account (far more useable that Dropbox 2gb).

Also if you, or anybody here for that matter that's wants to try it, signs up with this referral link from me, you'll start with 20gb instead of 15gb.

Copy.com Account Sign-Up Bonus Referral

I use it for my processed photos folder to make sure it's always backed up without me having to even think about it. And free is the best kind.

[bar_foo]

I'll use it mainly for photo storage so all the files don't end up on my computers hard drive. @Mike L is your idea easy to do, as I'm not a "tech guy"? Do you have a link for a product that would fit the bill so I can do a little more research?

You can sometimes save a little money by buying an enclosure and drive separately, but not much and it's not worth the hassle if things go wrong (two warranties to figure out if something fails instead of one). If you're not a tech person, just get a brand-name powered USB 3.0 drive with 2 or 3 TB and be done with it.

[Mike L]

I'll use it mainly for photo storage so all the files don't end up on my computers hard drive. @Mike L is your idea easy to do, as I'm not a "tech guy"? Do you have a link for a product that would fit the bill so I can do a little more research?

I don't know this particular brand but something like this coupled with a hard disk of your choice is what I am talking about. You don't have to be tech savvy (I'm not) just plug the hard disk into a Sata connector and screw in a couple of screws.

As @bar_foo mentioned it's not as simple as buying a name brand USB powered drive but you have more flexibility in choosing the brand and specs of the hard drive. I used this method to kill two birds with one stone i.e. bought a new bigger, faster hard drive for my data drive in my laptop and swapped the old smaller drive out into an enclosure to be a external drive for back ups.