Advertising: Buyer Beware Blog

     My group explored external hard drives and their dependability for our Buyer Beware project. In our personal experience we have found them to be unreliable, so we wanted to get more information about their failure rates, what brands are best, and how to take the best care of these product.

     In our primary research, we tried to get information from every side to create the most complete and exhaustive results. As much as possible, we tried to put ourselves in a consumer’s shoes. To do this, we went and purchased a hard drive ourselves. We also conducted interviews with employees at electronics stores and John Pura, a Media Technician at Red River College. We tapped into his expert opinion because it’s a viewpoint that many consumers don’t have access to, and we knew his personal experience and knowledge would provide good insight.

     Our secondary research was exploring the Internet’s articles, forums, and product reviews for information and others’ opinions.

     The brands that kept coming up in our research as best and highest rated were Western Digital, SeaGate, and LaCie.

They scored high ratings in online product reviews and came highly recommended by our expert interviewees.

     Unfortunately, most hard drive manufacturers don’t disclose their failure rates. So instead, warranties become very important. In our research we found that hard drives are susceptible to failure at any time, so it’s crucial to choose a product with a long warranty. It’s also important to shop smart; there are many issues that consumers should think about before purchasing an external hard drive. The issues that we addressed in our report were: operating system (do you need both PC and Mac?), portable vs. stationary, Firewire vs. USB interface, stability (look for a sturdy model), and of course, warranty.

Lastly, we picked up as many tips for proper care as possible. In a nutshell, make sure you keep your hard drive cool and secure, run computer programs that cleanup disk space and diagnose problems often (many of these programs come standard on your computer), and remember that any product can fail, so back up important files in more than one place.