06.Hard drives
More than half our respondents have external hard drives, and more than half of those were purchased in the past year. Of those, half are 1TB (terabyte) or 500GB (gigabyte) drives. Three quarters of the drives come from just four manufacturers: Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and LaCie. Of those, Western Digital is the single most popular brand at 38%.
Reliability
In the past 12 months, 8% of owners have had problems with their external drives, with Maxtor being reported most problematic at 12%. The most common problems were characterised as “drive failure”, or software and connectivity. But repairs were uncommon, with 98% of all drives not needing repair.
