Toshiba 1Tb External hard drive £69.98 delivered

isofa

The F1 Spinpoints are excellent drives.

Leopard

Mine arrived this morning (i.e. next day, despite the fact that I opted for "delivery within 5 days" in order to obtain the free shipping).

Thanks eBuyer! :money:


I opened it up (bye-bye warranty...) and took a look inside. Here, as promised, is what I found.


The hard drive itself is indeed a Western Digital, as mooted by muldoonuk.

It's a WD10EAVS model from the "Caviar Green" range.

SATA300
1.0 TB
8MB cache

MDL: WD10EAVS-00D7B1
WWN: 50014EE202717513
DCM: DBRNHT2CFB
LBA:1953525168

5VDC:0.70A
12VDC: 0.55A
R/N: 701590

Manufactured 4 February 2009 (doesn't state where).

Western Digital's info sheet for it is here.


Toshiba'a model number for it is PX1396U-3T01 and its spec sheet is here. A sticker on its outer casing states that it was "Made in Slovakia".

It lists the buffer size as 16MB - as does eBuyer. Hmm. :cool:

Both Toshiba and eBuyer quote its spin speed as 7,200 rpm. Western Digital, however, quotes no spin speed for it and instead claim that it incorporates something called "IntelliPower", of which it states, "A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate, and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance. For each drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM."

It's got a sleek aluminium casing, no fan and, usefully, it has an on/off switch (seemingly robust).

Spun up, it's extremely quiet (inaudible to me) and, on initial inspection, my Mac advises that, out of the box, it's come formatted in MS-DOS FAT32 and has a usable capacity of 931.51 GB.

I also tried plugging it into the USB2 port on my (square, Gigabit version) Apple Airport Extreme and it appeared on the desktops of all my Macs without problem; so it's fine for anyone who wants to use it as a network drive in that manner or for making Time Machine backups either wirelessly or by wired Ethernet.

I think it's very nice, remarkably well priced and I've just ordered another one from eBuyer while stocks last!

456789

thanks a lot for the info Leopard

Leopard

I've now applied one of these very nice and extremely quiet drives to the role of adding a terabyte of external storage to my Humax FoxSat-HDR box, via the latter's rear USB2 port.

If you want to do the same, for this bargain price of £70, you may find the following information helpful.

It's not as satisfactory as swapping the box's meagre 320 GB internal hard drive for a larger capacity internal one but opening up the Humax box itself would void its warranty and I don't want to do that with mine until the warranty expires (in case the Humax box itself expires during the course of it). Once it's a year old, though, I intend to put a 2TB drive inside it. In the meantime, an external terabyte of storage is very handy to have. I was struck, moreover, by the fact that Western Digital's own notes for the hard drive inside the Toshiba enclosure claim that it has been optimised for use with video - whatever that actually means technically.

Doing this is not as straightforward as might be assumed: you can't just plug it in - you have to reformat it. The Humax box (at least with its present firmware) will only work with discs formatted in FAT32 or in something Linuxy called EXT3.

With FAT32 there's a problem, however. It won't let you use files that are greater than 4 GB (that's just the way FAT32 is) and two hours of decent HD produces a file of some 15 GB.

So, it's best to format the external drive in EXT3. (And, before you ask, no, EXT2 won't work instead; it has to be, specifically and uncompromisingly, EXT3.)

Bear in mind that your Toshiba hard drive comes formatted with a single 931 GB partition in FAT32. Windows, I'm told, can't (itself) make a FAT32 partition that size. (Ironically, a Mac running OS X, can.) So, if you reformat the drive into EXT3, you'd need (I'm told) third-party software to restore it to a large single FAT32 partition with Windows.

But since FAT32 has the file-size limits already referred to, you'd probably want to reformat it to NTFS for use with Vista or XP anyway - or HFS+ for a Mac - so it's no great loss. You should, nonetheless, be aware of this fact before you modify it.

This reformat isn't particularly complicated to do - hell, I managed it and the only thing I know about Linux is how to spell it - but you do need to know what to do and it also requires access to a PC (unless you know how to run Linux on a Mac - which I don't). My companion's work Dell laptop obliged on this.

So, here's how to do it. Well, here's how I did it, anyway, and it worked for me - usual disclaimer, if you screw it up you're on your own...



Download this web page and print it out. (So you can then refer to it when the PC is moonlighting on Linux.)

Step 1, as listed, is to download a linked web file called "NimbleX" which is a compact form of Linux and is all you will need.

I did that bit on a Mac, and Step 2 as well, to produce the CD. If you use some infernal operating system from Microsoft instead, I guess you follow the instructions as they are written down; they don't look complicated but don't ask me how to do it with Windows on a PC.

(On a Mac, you just use Disk Utility. Click on the downloaded iso file in the list on the left of the page, click on "Burn" in the menu bar, insert a recordable CD and Burn will tell you what to do - which is basically just click on the button displayed to start the burn.)

That takes you to Step 3. You stick the CD you've just burned into a PC and do what it says on the instructions you printed out.

The main reason I'm posting this is that the final part of the instructions, Step 6, was written by a kindly soul who appears to suffer from a degree of dyslexia - which is not wonderfully helpful if you write source code...

So, here (added in red) is what I found I actually had to do with Step 6 to get it to work - original in green:



6 Here's the steps to format the drive. Thanks to Dj1471 from Digital Spy for the final step that makes it work

Click on the TV screen type icon to open a command shell (Konsole)

Carefully type and enter the following

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 (I found I needed to enter sdb1 instead of sda1. Be careful. You're booted off the CD and it will reformat whatever drive you instruct it to: if, by mistake, you instruct it to reformat the internal hard drive of your PC, it would do that :eek: .)

After you give it this command, it will take several minutes. maybe a quarter of an hour, to reformat the drive. Don't interrupt this process. Wait for it to tell you that the process is complete.

Next step is optional it let's you give the drive a name the example calls it FoxsatBU (Only this next line, which gives it a name of your choice, is optional; you still need to do all the next bits or it won't work. I called mine "HumaxUSB".)

e2lable /dev/sda1 FoxsatBU (He means e2label - not "lable". Again, I needed sdb1 - not sda1.)


Now to set the partition type

fdisk /dev/sda (Again, I needed sdb - not sda. This step produces a long warning message.)

type t and enter (Don't enter the word "type", just enter the letter t and then press your RETURN/ENTER key.)

enter 83 at the prompt (Again, just key in 83 and press your ENTER key.)

type wq and enter (No. This is important. Just key w - not the q - and then press your ENTER key. Otherwise it will simply quit from the menu without doing anything. Allow the process to complete and then exit manually from the console.)

close the Konsole window

Click on the world icon and then media manager

Right click on the USB icon and choose safely remove

Remove the USB drive. Your foxsat should now recognise it and allow large file transfers.


Plug the Toshiba drive into the rear USB2 port of the Humax box and start it up before you switch on the Humax box. Lo and behold, you now have 931 GB of external storage space. :dance:

All you then need to do is fathom out the rather bizarre but fairly simple manner in which the Humax box goes about letting you utiiise this.

In that, as in most things related to the Humax box, you will not find the booklet containing words written in English which Humax euphemistically calls its "User's Manual" a great deal of help. :mad:

Someone really ought to publish a proper book on how to use the Humax FoxSat-HDR - they would sell almost as well as the box itself does.

Until then, the best way to work out most things about it is to use Google. :rolleyes:

The box itself is brilliant, though, and this addition really adds to its usefulness. You can't record directly to the external drive but once you've copied something to to it from the internal drive you can then play it back direct from the Toshiba drive.

- UPDATE -

One year after posting the above, I've just used the same method (and, indeed, the same home-burned CD ) to format a 2TB external drive with EXT3, for the same purpose.

It works fine with the Humax FoxSat-HDR, via either of the Humax box's two USB2 ports.

Indeed, you can attach hard drives formatted in EXT3 to both the front and the rear USB2 ports of the Humax box simultaneously; it will then let you archive, and play back, recordings to and from whichever of them you wish - but you cannot copy recordings directly from one external drive to the other through the Humax. To achieve that, you have to copy the file back on to the box's internal drive and then copy it, from there, on to the other drive.

Doing this gives you a total external storage capacity of 4TB if you use two 2TB drives. The Humax box can now address external hard drives of 3TB and greater - but those are still expensive, so a couple of 2TB drives is currently the most cost-effective solution if you want a semi-permanent setup without resorting to a dock and a lot of hard-drive swapping.

Leopard

[QUOTE=badoosh;19760731

]Do they have the Petabyte version [/QUOTE]

Yes. But that version is aimed at Windows users who need somewhere to store all their supplied bloatware and anti-malware logs.

Leopard

Thanks for your "Thanks" (although I felt that my posting which preceded it was more worthy of it. )

chaddy7604

Leopard wrote: »

Thanks for your "Thanks" (although I felt that my posting which preceded it was more worthy of it. )

I've "thanked" you because it's informative and I don't even have a Humax box :rotfl:

scullster

roland_turn wrote: »

Newbie entering thread - go easy!

I was about to but a 750GB or 1TB Maxtor One touch Plus hard drive, I'm very lazy about backing up and the one touch bit appealed to me. I think Maxtor are linked to Seagate but I admit to knowing nothing about hard drives. Is this correct? Would I be better to stter clear and go with the Toshiba?

There's an easier way which I'd recommend more than remembering to press a button -

http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

You can set it up to run daily to check your my docs folder or wherever, check for changes and backup just the changes to your new 1TB ext HDD. I've tried a few software but with this one, the backup copy is a mirror image of your my docs folder (or whatever) so if your usual HDD crashes, you simply need to copy the data across. Takes about 10mins to setup if that, you'll just need to remember to keep your ext HDD switched on.

bob_a_builder

There's an easier way which I'd recommend more than remembering to press a button -
http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

Were you recommending a specific bit of s/w from that site ?

could b spam ( 1st post and all) - but we've all got to start from somewhere I suppose

wazza

Thanks for the find.

Is it better to get from Amazon or ebuyer. Thinking about aftersale service if you have any problems.

Any cashback from sites such as quidco?

Thanks