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5 Crucial Points To Keep In Mind While Shopping For External Harddrives
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5 Crucial Points To Keep In Mind While Shopping For External Harddrives

By: Adolph K. Reekie

Buying External Harddrives nowadays doesn't have to be a gamble, but if you take a quick look at the amount of disappointed customers doing reviews on sites like amazon, you get the impression that for most customers it still is. There are a couple of ways to find out if a product is worth buying, way before you actually consider spending any money on it. The problem is, it's also easier then ever to get sold on a product that, besides sounding wonderful, also features some well hidden deal breakers, which would make you never consider buying it in the first place. This article is going to show you the 5 key points to keep in mind when you're looking for new external harddrives, which will make sure you won't encounter any feelings of buyers remorse afterwards.
1. Every harddrive is going to fail somewhere down the road
That's the truth about both categories by the way, internal and external harddrives. The way today's harddrives are build, they are destined to be unable to operate one day. That's because both the platter (the "disk"-shaped medium inside the drive where the data is actually stored upon) and the "read-write head" (the mechanical device to modify and read data on and from the physical structure of the platter) are moving parts that wear off simply through use. This is normal, and doesn't need to cause any bigger problems if you know it beforehand and take reliability into account from the start. While all drives are essentially destined to fail one day, there are great differences between the available brands and products on how long it usually takes for this to happen.
2. Never get sold on features alone
Especially concerning external harddrives, there are in fact rarely any real killer features that one product has and another product doesn't. Even though the features of the bundled software sound great and a one-button backup may be really appealing to you, those things really just look far better on paper then what they are worth in real life. On first glance, your choices are really far from limited, quite the opposite is true: There are dozens of products for every capacity and connection method, and the hard part is to decide which one of those are the ones you should consider spending money on. There are a few simple criteria to look for when weeding out between contestants, but you will hardly find all of them (or any, mostly) on the feature pages or advertised in the manufacturers product description. Listed in order of ascending importance, these are:
1. Noise levels
2. Customer support quality
3. Failure rate/probability
4. Warranty
If you sleep in the room where your computer is situated and you intend to download files onto the drive at night, you can safely put "Noise level" on par with Warranty (it's still just equally, not more important).
Not that important features include:
1. Bundled Software
2. Performance (The exception proves the rule here, really bad performance is always a deal breaker but happens quite rarely)
3. "One-Button" features
So, why these criteria and not others? Well, if you are buying any kind of external Hard drive, the one key feature it should be good at is holding and keeping your files, right? And how do you determine whether the product you are considering will be up to the job? Through the length of the warranty the company grants you.
The higher the number of years of warranty a company provides, the longer a company estimates their own product to work flawlessly. They need to, because the price of the product has to be calculated in a way that takes realistic numbers of future warranty cases (and their costs in work time, parts, replacements, etc.) into account.
Let's assume for a second that you own a company selling these kinds of products. If you grant five years of warranty on a product that you think is likely to fail half the time somewhere within it's second year, you just doubled or tripled your costs compared to a product that's build to last. If you don't take this into account with your initial pricing, you're in for a lot of losses down the road.
This is the reason why you should always be looking for long warranty (3-5 years) and "decent" customer support (make no mistake though, a "decent" customer support nowadays just means that within 2 hours you will get someone on the phone who speaks english and provides you with instructions on how to return the product once it failed - that's about all you can expect).
3. Don't buy anything based solely on professional reviews
Professional reviews (i.e. reviews coming from computer hardware and storage-related websites) are definitely a good place to start, just reading up on some reviews will put you way ahead of most other uninformed customers.
But there is a catch: What a professional review can do is tell you which external harddrives you should not consider buying (due to troubles with the design, bad performance, product being totally overpriced and stuff like that). The opposite isn't true, however - just because a product has good professional review scores, it doesn't mean that you can just go and safely buy it. Journalists and Hardware magazines have very little means to measure the one key trait every external harddrive worth a penny should possess: Reliability.
Your fancy new external Harddrive may look gorgeous and perform extraordinary well, but that's worth nothing at all if it turns into a clicking piece of inaccessible junk (just do a quick search for "click of death" in wikipedia), just 2 months after the one year standard factory warranty ran out. As stated before, harddrives are bound to fail. But as always, some do so sooner, some will work for a longer period of time, and the one thing a professional reviewer can't know is which one of those two applies to the reviewed product.
In order to determine whether a product is worth buying or not, always also take user reviews into account. They know if a product ran well for longer then it's moneys worth or will probably malfunction really, really early. Good places to start looking for those are www.amazon.com and www.tigerdirect.com, among lot's of others.
4. Buyers reviews still aren't the holy grail - Every brand and product has it's fans and haters
First things first - buyers reviews can only be a good indicator for your buying decision if there are *more* then just a handful of those for your particular product (it's just an arbitrary number, but I found 8 to 10 reviews are required before I can personally take what they imply seriously).
When looking at buyers reviews, there is one key mistake most people make - they don't take the time to carefully read the actual review texts.
When I evaluate a product that has several negative (i.e.1 or 2 Star) reviews, the first thing I look at are the explanations the reviewers gave for their low rating. The key thing most people miss is, round about 1 out of a dozen reviewers takes into account whether his particular problem applies to all potential customers as well or not (and that's still a fairly optimistic number).
To give an on-topic example, a lot of external harddrives come bundled with backup and synchronizing software. And while you may be a pc user who is just looking for some more space to put his files into, another buyer who reviewed the product may have been looking for an automated backup solution for his critical files.
Now, if this reviewer finds out that the bundled software doesn't work with his mac computer, this may very well result in him giving the product a rather negative rating. Does this affect you as a pc owner who just needs some extra space for his files?
No way, and if you don't plan on buying a mac anytime soon, you can pretty much completely ignore this negative review. Needless to say that there are *lot's* of reviews which are similarly motivated and structured, which means there is no way to tell the quality of a product just by looking at the number of stars or points in the rating.
5. The most obvious choice is seldom the best
An old saying, I know, but an especially true one regarding external harddrives. The best external harddrives on the market are essentially still the internal ones. Huh?
Well, there is a cool little thing called "Enclosures" which allows you to put normal 3.5" Internal Hard Drives into an external packaging and then connect it to your pc via USB, Firewire or similar means. They existence is widely unknown because of the simple fact that they are harder to market (think along the lines of: "why advertise on 2 separate products the user needs to put together on his own when you can simply sell them one complete product?"). But the reality is, they are often cheaper, really easy to put together (if you can hold a screwdriver and keep breathing simultaneously you basically can't go wrong, it's really that simple) and by far the most reliable solution available. That's because you determine which drive to put into the enclosure, and don't have to live with the choice that the manufacturer made in that department (which he may very have made solely with "reducing the costs per unit" on his mind).
And they start at around $20 per unit.
(6. Additional advice)
Read #1 again. Read it carefully. You may have already realised this, but the only conclusion you can draw regarding your most important files is to never rely on just one backup. If you really wan't to make sure that all your family photos, videos, all your music and whatever else you hold dear is really unlikely to go down the drain anytime soon, make sure you have at least 2 backups in completely different locations (and ideally on different types of media). Which means, if you buy an external hard drive and copy your files there, remember to also back up your most important files on dvd. Or, if there are simply too many of them to efficiently store them on dvds, get another harddrive to copy the backup onto every other month.
Make sure one of the backup drives is used only when doing another backup and is otherwise safely stored. This way you can be really sure that in 99.9% of the time, at least one copy of your files will survive right about anything but a natural catastrophe. There are of course many other ways to back things up, like renting online storage and buying a streamer drive, but for the sake of keeping this guide "short" and on topic I won't get into them right now.
That's it for now, I hope you consider this valuable and will have an easier time reaching a fairly educated buying decision next time you consider purchasing External Harddrives.

Article Source: http://articlenexus.com

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