Western Digital 320Gb External Hard Drive USB2 £85 Delivered!

tracylaw

Another question - does anyone know whether you can tandem the WD My Book drives, on Firewire? Or would you have to plug each to the pc separately?

Tils

akamini wrote:

then you can say you have a terabyte of memory

Please dont take this as a flame.

But its disk space. Not Memory. Many non IT people make this mistake and its like saying the engine of your car vs the petrol you put in it. Very different however both are measured in the same thing Litres or in IT terms MB / GB etc.

Tils

ukbandit

what you are might be looking for is a NAS, or network area storage

something like this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Maxtor_NAS.html

lets you put in your own HDD, to the size you want, and will perform loads of other stuff for you at the same time.
the benefit is that if you have e.g. a wireless router, you caan connect this up to that and have wireless access to all your files, and its upgradable

greyster

Tils makes a very good point which is often overlooked.

Harddisks in general are the slowest part of the computer. If you are concerned about performance, make sure you invest in a good harddisk.

I do recommend western digital. If you look carefully at the specs on some of them on ebuyer, you will see they come with 3 year warranties.

Sui_Generis

tracylaw wrote:

Yes - also be careful to look at the spec, as this has an 8mb buffer ... maybe you can help with the following?

I wanted to buy two large hard drives (Drive 1 and Drive 2) so that I could store and make a duplicate of all my important things (including photo’s and movies) – the idea being

I've been doing some research, and I think the best deal is

Western Digital 400GB "My Book" Premium 1C External Hard Drive USB2.0/Firewire

I disagree with some of this especially 8Mb vs. 16Mb and a few other points. You're absolutely right to go for firewire it sustains higher speed transfers than USB2.

First off the obvious thing about backing up data is you can never have too many copies. That said storage costs money. I have TWO WD Premium 320Gb My Book drives - why 320? If you look at the price/Gb the 400Gb is simply the most expensive in the range and I'd avoid on that basis. I've bought the 320's for £104 and £102 respectively - watch Dabs and eBuyer as the price fluctuates daily.

2x 250Gb often works out cheaper. Also the sub 400Gb drives have 8Mb buffers and this is more than adequate for anything you'd want to do with video streaming or editing - indeed if you're worried about speed and capacity bear in mind the limiting factor is the connection speed rather then the data in the buffer USB2 peaks at 480Mbps and Firewire at 400Mbps. If you're REALLy worried about streaming capability then you need to buy a My Book Pro and pair it with a Firewire 800 port which probably means you'll have to buy a Mac Pro (£££!) or maybe find an add-in card? I stream from the 320's to an iMac without ever seeing a dropped frame (which would be reported! nothing so unreliable as leaving it to chance).

The cheapest -it's FREE - way to archive your photos is to upload them to a processor like Photobox (I've just been given over 1Gb of storage which I'll never use - caveat they'll only accept files types they can print) who have more RAID arrays to ensure they never lose data than any home user can afford. Google is another way via the gmail service (again 1Gb?).

One sobering thought: I've never had a WD drive fail but that doesn't mean I haven't lost data - because XP crashed (the SP2 install actually) and trashed the partitions. ALL drives fail and buying offsite storage may be the best option eventually. I make copies of all my photos on CD and send them to my Mother and sister to archive on their Macs and PCs.

If you want two external HDDs using one as a backup for the other then you need to consider a RAID array as it is done automatically. What this won't give you is portability ie. you can take a MyBook away to use on another computer.

I LOVE my MyBooks they are quiet automatically power up/down as needed and generally look good in an unobtrusive way. I'd recommend them. HTH



Oh and one small point that may be of use. I've moved from PCs to Mac because the platform is easier to use with anything that is graphics orientated and OS X is simply more robust and secure. I don't game and in every other respect I have far greater peace of mind than I ever had on a PC where - let's be honest we expect to have a serious-ish problem (not viruses etc hardly ever had those) at least a couple of times a year**.

You would not believe how simple it is to import, edit and produce mini-DV movies in iMovie - I can even do it on a 3 year old iBook without any worries, though iMovie 06 is really sweet.

**That's based on my experience as a PC builder and user since Win 3.1.

Sui_Generis

Tils wrote:

Please dont take this as a flame.

But its disk space. Not Memory. Many non IT people make this mistake and its like saying the engine of your car vs the petrol you put in it. Very different however both are measured in the same thing Litres or in IT terms MB / GB etc.

Tils

It's not just end users who say this, some retailers also refer to HDD space as memory. It's all down to the lack of standards

cigar_2

cigar wrote:

And they are not accepting orders of this item at the moment. Looks like they've realised there is a mis-price.

Now up to £132.77

Still "not currently available for purchase" though

Sui_Generis

tracylaw wrote:

Another question - does anyone know whether you can tandem the WD My Book drives, on Firewire? Or would you have to plug each to the pc separately?

Missed this earlier - you can daisy chain the Premium/Pro MyBooks via firewire or connect them individually to firewire ports or a mix of firewire and USB. HTH