Hardware What are the best overall external drives you have or you have used?

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Good evening!

Well, I'm thinking on buying many things and one of those things is a few external HDD (like 2 or 3) to use it with my WiiU, PS4, Wii... Well, those things.

So I wanted to know what are the best external drives you have used or you have (like a mini review or something like that) for those purpouses (for the WiiU, for example for backup loading - I mean, compatibility or whatever information I may need, for the PS4, for compatibilty, speeds... whatever I may need (in your opinion) and so on.).

If you can give me a name (and a price) I'd be very thankful, because I don't want to buy an extenral drive that probably won't work as expected. I don't know if you understand my point.

Thank you very much!

 

[migles]

i have a western digital elements 1tb drive, works great on my wii and ps3, didn't had any issues with it..
i don't know if a wii U needs a Y cable.. but i can confirm it working flawlessly on a wii or ps3
only one complain, led is too bright, i used some tape to cover the led
i think it's also not "a sleppy" drive, i tried to look into it, according to the tutorials it's not.. but if you abandon the hdd for like 10 minutes it goes into sleep however i don't have issues about this while playing on the wii
"sleep" is one of the concerns while looking for an external hdd on the wii, not sure if this affects other systems.. some drives go into sleep as soon as they can, which causes problems

 

[Enlapse]

i have a western digital elements 1tb drive, works great on my wii and ps3, didn't had any issues with it..
i don't know if a wii U needs a Y cable.. but i can confirm it working flawlessly on a wii..
only one complain, led is too bright, i used some tape to cover the led
i think it's also not "a sleppy" drive, i tried to look into it, according to the tutorials it's not..but if you abandon the hdd for like 10 minutes it goes into sleep however i don't have issues about this while playing on the wii
"sleep" is one of the concerns while looking for an external hdd on the wii, not sure if this affects other systems.. some drives go into sleep as soon as they can, which causes problems

Okay, thank you very much! I will consider it. And as far as I know, the WiiU needs a y cable, but that's not a problem!

THank you very much. Any more replies are welcome.

 

[migles]

the WiiU needs a y cable, but that's not a problem!

i can't talk much about this because i don't have a wii u neither tried one..
but i thought you only needed the y cable for some enclosures, not all of them
but anyway, i remember my cousins had a hdd that worked fine with just 1 plug on a laptop but required the extra connection while on the wii.. so i was surprised this one doesn't require the y cable

 

[tech3475]

I'd suggest making sure which ever drive you get internally uses a separate USB-SATA adapter as opposed to certain newer drives which integrate it into the HDD.

The main reason is because I've found in the past with faulty externals that the HDD itself can be fine but it's the USB port/IO adapter which is faulty so all I had to do was buy a new enclosure.

I know WD and Seagate have been going for the integrated option on their portable drives, with Seagate's 2TBs as an exception.

 

[Originality]

Iirc, the issue with WiiU was that it lowers the amps for the USB ports to something like 350mAh instead of the regular 500mAh, which makes some of the more power hungry drives fail unless a y-cable is used.

I've always used a Samsung M2 for Wii/PS3 flawlessly, whilst a friend used an old USB/IDE enclosure and had major lag loading homebrew (it was fine in games). I also have a Seagate (Elements?) 2TB external HDD and another 512GB SSD external enclosure which I've yet to stick to one purpose for (switching between games, media, Medicat and TimeMachine backups).

In the past I had an external 1.5TB drive from Maxtor which died, and I've helped dozens of people recover data from external Seagate drives in various states of non-functionality. Seriously, I've never seen any other drive have such high failure rates at Maxtor and Seagate (and I know that Seagate bought Maxtor but that's not the point).

 

[migles]

I'd suggest making sure which ever drive you get internally uses a separate USB-SATA adapter as opposed to certain newer drives which integrate it into the HDD.

i am sorry to derail, but do you have pictures or more info on this?

 

[Boogieboo6]

The only external hdd I've used was a 500GB with a brand I don't remember. It was ripped from an old computer. Mainly wanted to post here to say that I used a powered adapter so I didn't need a Y cable for my Wii U. The Y cable is just for power and some drives need more than 1 port can provide.

 

[tech3475]

i am sorry to derail, but do you have pictures or more info on this?

Here's an example of one with a separate HDD adapter:
http://www.jonshobbies.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/IMG_20140802_071701.jpg
http://www.jonshobbies.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/IMG_20140802_071631.jpg

Here's an example of one integrated:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K_5BTwpXwMA/TvotvfsFjBI/AAAAAAAABpg/W6_JTjF5NB4/s1600/P1000224.JPG

If say the USB port broke, for the former it's just a regular 2.5" SATA HDD so you only need to buy a new enclosure, while the latter would require either HDD recovery services, soldering a new USB port or a new controller board.