Which external hard drive to choose?

bgscotty

Hello!

I'd be grateful for advice on getting an external hard drive for my Dell Dimension 1100 desktop pc- currently RAM: 1GB / Hard drive capacity: 80 GB

I don't use it much yet for multimedia applications, though I want to do more with it in the future e.g. download movies, music, but not gaming.
Having learnt from a previous incident (:mad: ), I definitely want to be able to back up everything on the pc!!

Can anyone suggest things to consider and the specifications, etc. I should look for when buying an external hard drive?

Also, what are the differences between desktop/ portable and 3.5" / 2.5" drives?

Many thanks in advance.

Scotty

Whitefiver

Hi,

I have one of these for my backups, and this is a pretty good deal at £69 from amazon. This is a larger 3.5inch drive, the only benefit I can see for the 2.5 in drives is that they are smaller, and some don't need a separate power supply - but the smaller ones are more expensive.

The important thing is to take backups - so definitely worth getting something.

Regards,

White.

isofa

3.5" drives are larger, faster, and cheaper as they are based on desktop technologies.

2.5" portable drives are smaller, slower, more expensive, but often are bus powered, not requiring an additional power supply.

I've found Western Digital MyBooks to be good external drives, and their Passport drives are good portable ones (I've used both), good prices at Amazon. Plenty of other good brands too, LaCie (usually use Samsung drives inside) etc.

uktyler

The other alternative is a HD Media player, I just got a second hand one for £40, with a 60GB HD.
Works the same as an external HD, but plugs into the back of the TV for displaying photos/video, or for playing music.
Maplin sell one.
There is even one on ebay, with a built in FM transmitter, take it in the car with all your music, or at home just tune your radio to it, a great idea!

wonka

Consider a hard drive enclosure too. These cost £29, and then you just buy a standard internal hard drive (500GB ~ £58). Hey presto, you have an external 500GB hard drive for just over £85.

But the advantage of this approach is that, say in 18 months time when you can buy a 1TB drive for the same price, you can just swap it into your enclosure, and sell the old drive on ebay.

So you get a future-proofed external hard drive.

bgscotty

Hello all!

Thank you everyone for the good advice.

Sorry not to quite understand your advice Wonka, but are you saying that an enclosure fits around an "internal hard drive" allowing you to use it outside the pc? I have noticed that internal drives are a bit cheaper.

To explain a little... my current hard drive (80GB) is going to be replaced under warranty, so I can't increase its internal capacity (nor need I as it'll not cost anything).

I see that hard drives come in 160, 250, 320, 500 GB... Would it be a waste getting a big capacity or are there advantages in getting 2, 3, 4, 5, even 6 times my current desktop's capacity?

Thank you again!

Scotty

wonka

bgscotty wrote: »

Sorry not to quite understand your advice Wonka, but are you saying that an enclosure fits around an "internal hard drive" allowing you to use it outside the pc?

Yes! That's exactly what I'm saying.

My advice would be to get the biggest hard disk capacity you can afford. Every time I buy a new hard disk, I seem to have filled it after a few months!

bgscotty

Hello!

Thank you wonka!

I've been researching for a bit this afternoon and think, for my purposes, a 320 GB external hard drive should do me ok.

To those more knowledgeable than me, could you give me a clue what these three features actually mean in practice?:

* Dual USB & eSATA interface modules

* Triple USB, eSATA and FireWire

(which one of the two features above is "better"?)

* 16 MB cache


As always, the advice is much appreciated.

Scotty

Whitefiver

wonka wrote: »

Consider a hard drive enclosure too. These cost £29, and then you just buy a standard internal hard drive (500GB ~ £58). Hey presto, you have an external 500GB hard drive for just over £85.

Alternatively, 500Gb Western Digital My book from Amazon for £69 - as in link in my reply above. :rolleyes:

Regards,

White

Whitefiver

bgscotty wrote: »

Hello!



* Dual USB & eSATA interface modules

* Triple USB, eSATA and FireWire

* 16 MB cache


As always, the advice is much appreciated.

Scotty

The interface you want kind of depends on what you have on your PC. I'm no expert but I believe eSATA is the fastest, USB (assuming USB2) and firewire are much of a muchness unless you have the newest firewire which isn't that common. USB will work just about anywhere - even the newest USB3 due out later this year is supposed to be backwards compatible. A 16Mb cache can have an effect on the apparent speed of the drive - a bit faster perhaps.

Hope that helps,

Regards,

White

isofa

Firewire is a fantastic interface, there are two current standards Firewire 400 (common I have it on a 7 year old Mac laptop!) and Firewire 800 a more recently implimentation, slightly different connections, and faster, then a new faster one is due in a few months, like USB3. Both 400 and 800 are built into professional Macs, and top end PCs have 400 with only a handful supporting 800, but it can easily be added with a PCI card (Belkin sell many versions). Firewire is commonly used in the music and video industries because of it's transfer rate and it's a long established interface. eSATA is also fast, but only built in to relatively new PCs and only Mac Pros, however it's gaining ground, because most new PCs now come with external connectors (nearly all have SATA drives inside).

I use my external drives over Firewire (both on PC and Mac) and they give a better throughput for video and graphics files than USB 2 in the real world, in my experience. But eSATA would probably offer a similar turn of speed.

For ultimate compatibility get one with at least USB2, because if you need to connect to another computer to recover some files, it'll always have USB, but might not have the other interfaces.

The MyBook Premiums come with 3 interfaces, USB2, and both Firewire speeds, and I think there are versions with eSata too.

The 500Gbs are cheap, like Whitefiver recommends, and I think LaCie are doing an external 1Tb drive for £120 at the moment. So I'm not sure it's that cost effective to buy an enclosure and make one yourself, very little price difference.