Which external hard drive to choose?

uktyler

You can buy a 320GB media player on Ebay for £103, it works as an external HD, but plugs into your TV to play downloaded video, music etc. It will also record DVD's and TV directly into XVID, a compressed video format.
Link:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Portable-320gb-Media-Centre-Hard-Drive-Recorder-Player_W0QQitemZ280195574160QQihZ018QQcategoryZ16178QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Bob63

Whitefiver wrote: »

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

And you would be pushing that option *again* in this thread because you have a referrer URL built in so you can get commission. Shame on you!

b.t.w. IMHO I wouldn't touch Western Digital if it were the last drive make on earth. Awful things.

Mike

vaio

isofa wrote: »

......... I think LaCie are doing an external 1Tb drive for £120 at the moment.........

seems very cheap, got a link?

weegie.geek

£140 is the cheapest I've seen it.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/138923

That's still not too bad considering the cost of drives and external enclosures.

Whitefiver

cheesy.mike wrote: »

And you would be pushing that option *again* in this thread because you have a referrer URL built in so you can get commission. Shame on you!

b.t.w. IMHO I wouldn't touch Western Digital if it were the last drive make on earth. Awful things.

Mike

Sorry - there is no referral link there, please check your facts before throwing accusations around! (I am in no way affiliated with Amazon).

I have two of these WD drives, and they have been excellent.

Regards,

White

bgscotty

Hello!

Well, after all the brilliant advice, I settled on a 320 GB external hard drive with triple USB, eSATA and FireWire.

The box comes with the USB 2.0 cable.

With regards the eSATA and Firewire malarkey, how do I check if my pc can handle these connection types and what equipment do I need to set up an eSATA or Firewire connection?

Thanks again,

Scotty

Whitefiver

Well done for getting on the way to sorting our your backup strategy.

Sorry, eSATA I know nothing about (my PC is too old to support it). You will have to study the ports on your machine to see what is available - some graphics cards used to have firewire, for example. If not, you can buy cheap cards that will give you firewire ports - which is what I use. For what other posters have said, then it sounds like if you have a Mac, you are sorted for firewire.

You will need to decide how you are going to back up. For what it is worth, I take an image of my operating system partition about once a month with Norton's Ghost - which has got me out of trouble on at least one occasion. I also use Microsoft's free Synctoy for backing up main data directories on a regular basis. Just make sure you do something - I lost some valuable data a few years ago, and vowed it would never happen to me again.

Regards,

White.

bgscotty

Hello!

Thank you for all your helpful advice White- much appreciated.

The whole backing up issue is something which I'm basically at the start of learning.

The "ghost images", synctoy stuff means nothing to me, just now- so I need to do a bit of research.

At least I'm on the right road :T

Cheers...

Scotty

bookduck

isofa wrote: »

....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.

My friend some years ago when 500GB storage cost a fortune, bought a very cost effective Lacie drive. He found out it was 2 * 250GB drives in the same box, not even raided, just on 2 separate partitions - he felt stitched up like a kipper.

Looked at the link and that picture of the 1TB drive is very fat!

rcssmb

Anyone got an opinion on this external enclosure? These things Vista compatible?

http://www.storagedepot.co.uk/Enclosures-and-Cases/sc884/p216.aspx