Buffalo External Hard Drives @ Play (merged)

aris

LaCie make such devices. They are multiple hard disks in one case which present themselves as a 1TB disk when plugged into the USB port.

madjohn

Matty:
Yr better off getting a number of smaller drives (internal or external - you can get a USB hub if you don't have enough USB ports).

It's always better to partition large drives (i.e. breaks drive up into 'several' drives - E:, F:, G: etc) anyway as you get more info on them. Trust me, it's true.
Also, as has been mentioned, smaller drives will produce less heat, to a certain degree (no pun intended!! lol). They should last longer then.

Hope this helps.

Stompa

madjohn wrote:

Yr better off getting a number of smaller drives

And of course, when the drive eventually fails, you'll lose less data!

madjohn

... ^ that too..!

Chippy_Minton

Stompa wrote:

Maxtor have a terrible reputation - stick with Seagate if possible.

Yes, a trawl of Google suggests that Maxtor is one of the less reliable drives. Another reason for going with Seagate is that they have a 5 year warranty whereas other manufacturers only have 2 or 3 years. The drives are a little bit more expensive as a result though.

hilstep2000

Website says unavailable now!

jasonrat

300gb is available though

OGB03

Very interesting indeedy. My 40gb(!) laptop has now run extremely low on space because of iPod library,The Sims, Audacity... amongst many other programs and files etc.

Don't know what to do because the 300gb from Buffalo looks perfect but am a little concerned that it might not be suitable for my needs. I use my laptop at home and less in the field, so was thinking that I would keep all the 'business' type things running from the laptop and the 'entertainment' type things running from the ext HD - which I won't need when working on location. (Make sense?)

Should I save my money and just buy a new laptop, buy the 300gb ext HD and back up whole system and transfer games etc over or spend a bit more for less gigs on a more portable HD????

Am usually far more together, but just back from hols and a bit dazed and confused so any advice would be appreciated.;)

TIA

Odd_Fellow

OGB03 wrote:

Very interesting indeedy. My 40gb(!) laptop has now run extremely low on space because of iPod library,The Sims, Audacity... amongst many other programs and files etc.

Don't know what to do because the 300gb from Buffalo looks perfect but am a little concerned that it might not be suitable for my needs. I use my laptop at home and less in the field, so was thinking that I would keep all the 'business' type things running from the laptop and the 'entertainment' type things running from the ext HD - which I won't need when working on location. (Make sense?)

Should I save my money and just buy a new laptop, buy the 300gb ext HD and back up whole system and transfer games etc over or spend a bit more for less gigs on a more portable HD????

Am usually far more together, but just back from hols and a bit dazed and confused so any advice would be appreciated.;)

TIA

I'd recommend you buy a new 2.5 inch laptop hard drive and a 2.5inch external drive case for the old drive. The drive should be very easy to replace, most laptops have a panel on the underside that allows access to it.

That way, you can reinstall your operating system on the new drive and plug in the old one (via USB or Firewire) and copy all your data across and then use the old drive for backups.

matty_c608

Warranty? Well my concern would be the Data lost, not the lost money of the csot of the Hard Disk! I've many years of high quality photos I've taken, videos filmed on the digi camcorder etc! In the past 12 months alone, i've used 160GB of space! W00t :P

My needs is portability. I am always on the move, my data plugs into systems wherever i go! If I partition these drives will they be partitioned at the other end (i assume so, FAT tables are stored on the drive)?

I also always use FAT32 for Data Storage, because I hate NTFS File encryption - anyone recommend AGAINST this? I think eventually I will run into File Size/Disk Size Restrictions.

And how do you gain more space when partitioning the drives? What's the theory behind it exactly? I would have thought there'd be no differnece?

EDIT;

On the note of portability, if I get a few smaller drives, then they are not so easily carried in a single (reasonable sized) external case right? And since I like everything centralized and organised, I would like to keep it all on one drive!