EHD Question

S

SeaCastle

Member
I'm seriously considering getting an external hard drive for my laptop, for the following reasons:

1.) I've amassed 11 gigs of pictures (and growing...!) and I don't want to delete my pictures, but I don't have a need for them to be on my computer all of the time. Actually, that doesn't just apply for pictures. It's more that I have media that I don't need around always, but I would like to keep.

2.) I don't have a memory problem, but I'm at 70GB left (and growing) and I'm not planning on getting a new computer anytime soon.

Any suggestions? I want something that's at least 500GB, 1TB would be fabulous. Money isn't that much of an object, but one mistake I want to avoid is getting a backup drive, but more of an external hard drive. The hard drive we have now is 500GB, but is not directly accessible via Windows Explorer, but through an application, which I find frustrating.

Thanks in advance.
 
ozzietropics said:
I don't have a memory problem, but I'm at 70GB left (and growing) and I'm not planning on getting a new computer anytime soon.
Click to expand...

Growing? Why then you have no problem if the remaining space is growing! ;D

Anyway ...

I have a Maxtor "One Touch 4" 500GB external HD that I use for weekly backups of my laptop HD (lucky thing too - I had to reformat my laptop not long after I got it, and without it I would have lost dozens of GB of irreplaceable files! :o). I really like it, and it cost around $90 on sale (according to Google, it ranges from $90-$130 regular price). It's really designed for backing up stuff more than external storage (comes with software for auto-backup), but it is very compact (only about 5"-6" high), weighs around 1 LB and looks like something out of Star Wars. ;D Great to take places if you need to - provided you can plug it into a wall.

So if you want to protect your pictures you can back them up to it, but I don't know if it makes a great off-site storage system ... I speak from experience when saying that backing up stuff like that is a more than worthwhile step to take though. ;) You could probably set up your own folder outside the backup folders on the drive and probably use those for storage, but I've never tried it to know how well that works.
 
I've been buying Macally brand external drive enclosures from Amazon.com and Newegg.com and then separately buying Seagate hard drives to install in those enclosures.  Seagate has a five-year warranty and their drives have been very reliable in my personal experience.  I have an archive of my digital photos on a 500GB Seagate PATA drive in a Macally PHR-100AC FireWire/USB 2.0 enclosure.  It shows up in Windows as a removable drive with a drive letter when I power it up.

I only power up that archive drive long enough to copy photos from my main drive.  That model hard drive is supposed to last 700,000 hours so I'm hoping that style of usage will result in that drive having a very long life.  I also keep the drive in a closet in another room.  Just in case... ::)

I read through the reviews of the enclosure on both Amazon and Newegg before I decided to purchase my first one.  I liked it so much now I own six of them.  The enclosure costs $45-50 and the various 500GB PATA Seagate bare drives are currently $80-100 at Newegg.  I decided to assemble my own external FireWire drive instead of buying a preassembled external backup drive because I wanted to know what components were being used.  I spent more money but I feel better ;).
 
I've been a firm believer of externals since my first hard drive crash oh so many years ago, when I bought a 20MB Apple external for about $400, if I remember correctly!  I am currently using Western Digital's MyBook drives, and love them!

I am anal about redundancy, knowing that anything with moving parts can fail at any time, so I buy two every time I add on to the system, and make a backup of the backup!  The extra time and expense is worth it considering the $$ value of what i would lose if a drive failed.

Just my 2 cents...


 
I try (where possible) to copy to more than one external hard drive (I have 5 at the moment).
They are getting cheaper and cheaper now (my first was 30gb, my last 350gb and my next will be bigger still).
I also make a point of copying my entire "C" drive onto one every so often as the main drives are usually much smaller than the external USB ones.
I also keep copies of downloaded programs, exe files etc on either CD or DVD (just in case) and a hard copy of all serial numbers.
Copying to DVD is also a good backup for photos and mp3 files and, let's face it, they are not that expensive now.
In the UK, the seagate drives are well under £100 now which, considering what's on them, isn't that expensive (that's 50 MacDonalds Happy Meals, just to give a comparison). ;D
 
I just bought a new external HDD with 1TB some months ago .. it has a new hightech super low energy conusption drive .. it's super silent and super cold .. but I don't know if this brand is there in the us

http://www.trekstor.de/de/products/detail_hdd.php?pid=16&cat=0
 
Ximagineer said:
I've been a firm believer of externals since my first hard drive crash oh so many years ago, when I bought a 20MB Apple external for about $400, if I remember correctly!  I am currently using Western Digital's MyBook drives, and love them!

I am anal about redundancy, knowing that anything with moving parts can fail at any time, so I buy two every time I add on to the system, and make a backup of the backup!  The extra time and expense is worth it considering the $$ value of what i would lose if a drive failed.

Just my 2 cents...
Click to expand...

Exactly what I do.  I have three backups, all on WD MyBook drives.  I use one as my main hard drive and have had no problems using it in that capacity.
 
Are these HDs able to be opened from Windows Explorer and are considered removable storage devices rather than an application?
 
Yes ;D - at least the USB ones do.
They show up in "my computer" in the same way as the "C" drive does and act just the same in Explorer as any other file.
Take care with the format though.
I changed mine to Fat32 so I could use them on both my current PCs (XP and WinMe).
The drives you get now are formatted to NTFS which older systems can't see/understand.
 
I changed mine to Fat32 so I could use them on both my current PCs (XP and WinMe).
The drives you get now are formatted to NTFS which older systems can't see/understand.
Click to expand...

but fat32 won't handle large files .. like the *.iso's on here (although I had fat32 hdd's that handled large files with no problem.. no idea why)
 
For some strange reason, mine do as well ;D
I've had no problems with DVD size files with Fat32 (mind you, the maximum size is 4Gb and there's not that many single files here of that size - I can always split them anyway either by splitting the downloads or saving to my "C" drive which is NTFS and convert them to a smaller size - where there's a will, there's a way ;D ). I suppose one could always have a dedicated HDD formatted to NFTS for those larger ones anyway.
Mind you, I never had problems with Millennium recognising large HDDs either - it always saw them for the size they were and not a maximum of 32Gb as the experts say.
Nearly ALL my EHDs are more than 32Gb and I've never had a problem with any of them (40Gb, 120Gb, 140Gb and 350Gb).
I'm not going to tell my PC, what it doesn't know won't hurt it. 8)
I don't think Vista can "see" Fat32 though. Fortunately, I have XP!
 
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