dennis yang dot com

Grrr…

So I’ve outgrown my external backup HD… I have an 80gb Maxtor USB that has trustily served as my backup drive for the past few years… And, now it’s getting painfully full, so I really need a new external hard drive. I know what I want.. about 200 gb, USB2.0 (I don’t have firewire), reliable and cheap.

Now, I realize fully that reliable and cheap are sliders that don’t really work in concert, so I’m willing to weigh the options when making my decision in buying something.

But.. in looking around for these stinkin’ things, I realize that even though we live in the new era of information, and all of this product review data is out there, and that we have a read/write web, blah blah blah blah… it’s still an immense PITA (pain in the arse) to actually compile and find all of this data and make an educated buying decision. Grrr.

A quick search for USB drives comes up with a PCWorld article from last year (yay).. and at CNET, I find a review of a bunch of Firewire drives with this comment.. “The fastest, best-looking external hard drive we’ve tested to date.” — Um.. ok, last I checked, I was looking for a BACKUP hard drive.. Shouldn’t reliability trump speed and good-looking-ness? Jeez. Ok, I’m getting annoyed now.

So, I do what I usually do when I look to buy stuff, and go to the actual merchant site to see what’s actually being featured, with the intention of going back and then looking for reviews on the featured stuff to see if it’s just a load of crap. So, at Buy.com their most popular drive is this LaCie 250GB drive for like $139.95.. Damn, that’s not a bad price. I remember back in the day I bought a 300mb hard drive for like $300.. I was so excited. I was like.. whoa.. 300 megs? I’m NEVER gonna need another hard drive! This is awesome! It was a western digital caviar drive, man.. caviar.. what a good name for a hard drive.

Anyway.. so seems like a good deal, right? So I go around the net, looking for reviews about this hard drive, and surprise, surprise.. they’re mixed.. Well.. in the case that the hard drive worked, people are ecstatic, giving it a high rating.. in the case that the hard drive crashed, people are pissed, giving it a low rating. Well.. duh, I coulda told you that. This is the type of product where, frankly, subjective user opinions really don’t add very much to the mix.

(really nerdy paragraph ahead…)
What I really need is some sort of quantitative failure rate of these hard drives in the field, and then I can weigh for myself the relative reliability of the product. I try and look around for user reviews for other hard drives, and yes, there are a few with better aggregate ratings, but since the sample sizes are so small relative to the number of hard drives sold, I don’t know what good it actually does.. But, is anyone going to actually do that work? I kind of doubt it.

Not to mention the fact that if someone’s happy with their external hard drive, how many people are gonna write about that… if it crashes, sure, tell the world.

Argh.. so I’m back to square one, really.. I just want a 250gb external USB 2.0 hard drive.

So, what am I going to do? I’m probably going to buy that LaCie 250gb hard drive from Buy.com — why? not because the reviews are good.. not because I’ve done all of this research. but, because that drive seems like a good deal and it was “featured” on the Buy.com hard drive page. baa.. baaa…

And now, since I complained, this drive will most likely crash at some inopportune moment and I will lose years and years of my digital pictures and I’ll be really really pissed.

Oooo.. the hard drive is designed by Porsche though. That means that I can show it off to chicks and they’ll be impressed, right?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 6:43 pm and is filed under ramblings, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.