External Hard Drive

HollaHolla84

Hi there, was wondering if anyone can help me, I need an external hard drive which can connect to a laptop (usb??) prices seem a little random, 1tb seem to be similar in price to much smaller ones. Looking for a good website for a cheap drive, I'm only looking for a 160gig or similar. Thanks

cit_k

May as well get a larger one if the price is the same.. Hard drives reduce in price/gain capacity regularily, hence older small drives are often similar in price to newer larger ones.

supermonkey

Would help if you indicated what kind of price you are looking at

HollaHolla84

Well the cheaper the better really, Hoping sub £40 if possible.

supermonkey

£40 should easily get you 160Gb. To be honest, I would hope you could get a little more storage for that

da1seggy

It depends on your intended use also.

Consider whether you want a portable external (powered by USB & will fit in a coat pocket) or a desktop external (powered by mains adaptor).

Obviously the desktop ones tend to be bigger physically (about the size of a video tape) but they have much bigger storage. You can buy 1TB for under £70.

You may not need that much space now but circumstances may change. Better to have it & not need it, rather that need it & not have it

kwikbreaks

One of the biggest causes of price variation is what type of external drive you want.

The ones using 3.5inch drives need a separate power supply and are higher capacity and cheaper than those based on 2.5inch laptop drives which are powered directly from the USB ports (typicaly they need 2 ports)

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SNAP

Inactive

kwikbreaks wrote: »

One of the biggest causes of price variation is what type of external drive you want.

The ones using 3.5inch drives need a separate power supply and are higher capacity and cheaper than those based on 2.5inch laptop drives which are powered directly from the USB ports (typicaly they need 2 ports)

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SNAP

I always thought that but I purchased a Samsung 2.5" one a few weeks back and it has a single USB cable, it works fine.

kwikbreaks

The extra port is for the power drawn - USB spec only allows 500ma and the drives take very close to that.. I had one that only came with a single port cable and it worked fine on one PC but another one just powered itself down whenever I plugged it in.

PZH

I've been looking into getting a 1Tb external drive ( with power supply ) for a few months now. They seem to be around the £60+ mark.

However, my main concerns are the lack of on/off switches ( is this really a problem though ? ) and the alarmingly high number of reported failures after a few months - most seem to be related to the drives getting very hot ( and the infamous Seagate "Click" of death ) ?

Why is this ? I have never had an internal hard drive fail on me - I know the PC unit has fans - but surely they don't generate that much heat ??
:think:

John_Gray

Has anyone come across a device/cable in the UK that can be used to actually measure the current drawn from a USB port? All I can find is something from Hong Kong...