Best External Drive for the money?

[BowlofDick]

I have had surprising results using the Seagate Expansion 8TB drive. You can lay it flat like an HDD/SSD enclosure and they're around $90-$100 dollars at your typical membership warehouse store (C0stc0, etc.). Obviously, your best bet is a SSD JBOD array - which I also have inside an old Dell 3550 server. You can download a copy of VEEAM which is a backup solution (free for personal use) and it is a pretty intuitive software solution so you can backup your files or mirror drives (prime & backup). Much like everything else in life, it is all a matter of how much you want to spend and how time/effort you want to put into making your files redundant. Good luck!

On your unrecognized drive- if you're running Windows- does computer manager see the drive? I had a similar issue with a WD drive so I backed it up, formatted it, and now it works like a charm. Virtual Disk Manager was trying to read drive info off bad sectors.

[rbn]

Originally Posted by MasterBates

for some of mine that wont work I change the plugin wire (usb) and it pops up but w/ wd i only got 1 and i hate using it/plug it in and it just sits there then after about a hour will popup if it wants to..has a mind of its own

Extended load times is usually a sign of bad sectors. Suggest making a drive copy on another drive. Some files will likely not copy.

[BowlofDick]

Originally Posted by rbn

Extended load times is usually a sign of bad sectors. Suggest making a drive copy on another drive. Some files will likely not copy.

Once you have copied all the available files- delete them- do a disk cleanup- and hopefully you will get a few more files that will copy. Once you have recovered as much as you can- reformat it and see if VDS will recognize the drive. Depending on the age of the drive- I would suggest at approximately 80% - 85% of capacity you consider it full and switch out drives. Good luck!

[Vitamin-X]

I got the SANDISK SSD PORTABLE. It's super fast with stable speeds and portable. I'm pretty happy about it.