External Hard Drive? ! !

mcnutsuk

Still looking to buy an external hard drive but havent found any good deals. Would prefer to spend less than 80quid.

Any thoughts ? :money:

thanks

indiegirl_2

Not sure what size you want, but eBuyer are doing this drive for about £80. They have quite a few 80gb drives (like this one which I use at work) for well under £80 as well.

mcnutsuk

indiegirl wrote:

Not sure what size you want, but eBuyer are doing this drive for about £80. They have quite a few 80gb drives (like this one which I use at work) for well under £80 as well.

Cool, I saw that on Ebuyer but wasn't sure about Maxtor as a brand, has it been working ok for you?

indiegirl_2

I've worked in a couple of schools now, and at my last school we would only use Maxtors, mostly because they usually (on their standard IDE drives, at least) carry a 3yr warranty, unlike others which are often only a year.

I had one Maxtor drive fail on me in that time, and it was replaced within a week, although sending it off to Ireland wasn't cheap. However, in the time that one Maxtor failed, I couldn't count how many Western Digitals or other brand drives failed... computers in schools take a lot of abuse from kids!!

I always recommend and use Maxtor, to be honest. My drive's been faultless in the time I've had it - and it's in constant use.

gromituk

What do you think of these from eBay? They're about £8 cheaper than the eBuyer one and the seller seems to have a good reputation. Besides looking different, they seem to have a fan. I guess that'll make them noisier but whether or not it will make them more reliable I couldn't say.

seth

gromituk wrote:

What do you think of these from eBay? They're about £8 cheaper than the eBuyer one and the seller seems to have a good reputation. Besides looking different, they seem to have a fan. I guess that'll make them noisier but whether or not it will make them more reliable I couldn't say.

No need for a fan, well built. Worth £8 more Ebuyer are good with returns etc all on line.

RedDev11

Might be an alternate way of doing this.

I have just recently bought 2 hard drive caddies from a local shop for a tenner, which allows you to install in the CD Rom bays, and you can plug and play normal hard drives with it.

Which is cheaper than buying an external one i assume.

leeparker123

What about building your own?

Enclosure - £13.99
http://www.ukdvdr.co.uk/shop/product.php?productid=17920&cat=75&page=1

Hard Drive - 160Gb - 49.27
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=12654248512&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=47653

Just a thought....

gromituk

Yes, it's a thought, though once postage is added you only save £5 or so.

As for caddies, well they're not for me as I'm using a laptop!

gromituk

Oh damn - was just ordering one of these drives and discovered that Ebuyer refuse to send your first order to anything but the billing address. Stuff that - they've lost the sale.

gromituk

Aldi have got a 250G 8M cache drive from Thursday 24th. May pop round and see if they have any in stock.

Edit: silly me - the price - £100.