External Hard Drive

[Shroom Man 777]

I am looking for an affordable yet reliable model of External Hard Drive as my philandering downloading ways is filling up my ancient P4's hard drives. We bought this PC in the early 2000s, so it might be eight years old at most. Its three hard drives give it a total memory capacity of around 160 gigabytes, but I've got only thirty or so gigs left and they're scattered over three hard drives. So, I'm rather short on space. We had another External Hard Drive but it kind of broke and we had to pay monies to recover the data in it, and I do not want a repeat of that one.

Any suggestion, mangs? I'm NOT looking for some monster with a terabyte of memory, I'm just looking for something affordable yet with lots of room to put my accumulated... media.


Thanks!

^__________^

[Lonestar]

Here's a 500GB Seagate that will run you 85 Quatloos.

[Starglider]

We had another External Hard Drive but it kind of broke and we had to pay monies to recover the data in it, and I do not want a repeat of that one.

The only reliable way to avoid that happening again is to buy two hard drives and back up the data. Or you could buy a NAS box with RAID 1 mirroring (i.e. it has two hard drives inside it and keeps them in sync automatically). Anything you need protected against fire and theft should be backed up off site of course; fortunately this is easy to do these days when you can get large, encrypted USB sticks so cheaply.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Indeed. Physical Storage's become quite cheap.

My Aunt's new low end Dell came with a 300~ Gig HDD as it's lowest option.

I have a 1Terabyte WD My-book external HDD that ran me $150. (Though they have their own issues.)

[Shinova]

Are there problems with the WD mybook series cause I'm using one at the moment.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Nothing serious, it's just a couple things I saw on the wiki page.

Dunno, mine's fine, going on 6 months now. Guessing your's last longer so far.

[Kojiro]

My WD mybook has performed flawlessly, and I'm constantly taking it about the place and swapping it between my PC and PS3. I'm not sure where you are but Officeworks was selling the 1TB models here for AU$160 about a month ago and still have a heap of them as of last week. Don't know if the price is still so good though.

[Kitsune]

On external hard drives, I ordered a WD 320 mg HD for $53 and a hard drive encloser for $17. Both had free SH from new egg.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Western Digital is pretty much one of the those bang for buck brands out there. There is one with 2 hard drives in one i think. Not sure if it is still on sale.

[Siege]

IIRC I paid €115 for my WD Elements 1TB external disk. It's served me exceedingly well so far.

[Kitsune]

New Egg had cheaper complete 250 gb external hard drives but there was no review of them and who knows what brand of hard drive would be in it. I wanted to get a hard drive with a good reputation. There was a tossup between Western Digital and Seagate.

[General Zod]

Are there problems with the WD mybook series cause I'm using one at the moment.

I have two WD 500gb mybook externals that are going on 3 years, and I've never had any issues. They're easily one of the better manufacturers I'd recommend if you want good value for space.

[darthbob88]

I'm also looking to get an external hard disk or two. I've got some hard disks I'd like to use for the purpose, and some plastic sheets suitable for building a container out of. All I need still is the interface unit, something to let me connect my IDE drives to USB outlets, and nothing I've been able to find has been able to help; they're either useless little cables, or 40-pin to USB converters with no provision for power. Where would I go, what would I look for, and how much would one of these cost me?

[Kitsune]

Easiest to get an enclosure with all of the stuff already part of it....

[darthbob88]

Easiest to get an enclosure with all of the stuff already part of it....

Well, true, and if all else fails, I can get an external HD, and replace the one they provide with one of mine, though that would be expensive. On the other hand, style has to factor in here. How many manufacturers do you know who would give you a mahogany case?

[Kitsune]

They use aluminum because the case is also used for cooling

[Dominus Atheos]

They use aluminum because the case is also used for cooling

A wood enclosure would run a serious risk of catching on fire.

[eyl]

Easiest to get an enclosure with all of the stuff already part of it....

Well, true, and if all else fails, I can get an external HD, and replace the one they provide with one of mine, though that would be expensive. On the other hand, style has to factor in here. How many manufacturers do you know who would give you a mahogany case?

You should be able to buy an enclosure without an installed HD - it runs considerably cheaper.

[Kitsune]

A wood enclosure would run a serious risk of catching on fire.

Most seem to have paper labels and never seen one even blacken so I doubt ot is that bad

[phongn]

A wood enclosure would run a serious risk of catching on fire.

Not necessarily.

[darthbob88]

A wood enclosure would run a serious risk of catching on fire.

Most seem to have paper labels and never seen one even blacken so I doubt ot is that bad

Agreed, but the fact remains that metal cases would provide better cooling than a wood case, no matter how nifty it would be. I'm looking for an empty enclosure now, and most of them seem to be quite affordable.

[General Zod]

You should be able to buy an enclosure without an installed HD - it runs considerably cheaper.

Not necessarily, it depends on what sizes and brands you're looking for. It's perfectly possible to buy 250/320gb external USB hdds that are comparatively priced to their internal equivalents. 500gb and up will be somewhat mixed, but for the most part the price isn't that significantly different.

[Kitsune]

Actually, I could have gotten a 250 GB cheaper in an inclusive package than a 250 GB Hard Drive and Encloser separately but there were no reviews on the product and who knows who actually makes the hard drives.

Does anyone other than Western Digital, Seagate, or Toshiba make actual hard drives anymore?

[erik_t]

They use aluminum because the case is also used for cooling

A wood enclosure would run a serious risk of catching on fire.

The exothermic processes of wood combustion start around 540degF, or 550 Kelvin. Wood's emissivity ranges from about 0.85 to 0.9. Taking 550K and 0.8 as the emissivity, radiative heat transfer would be around 4150 W/m^2.

This enclosure has a surface area of about 0.034m^2 (it would be rather more, of course, if it were made of wood, since wood panels will tend to be thicker than aluminum).

This enclosure, made of wood, would radiate in excess of 140 watts of heat, steady-state, before catching on fire. Note that convection and conduction are typically much more effective means of moving heat; that's why getting rid of excess heat in space is such a serious problem.

Typical hard drive power consumption is in the 10W range.



Your signal-to-noise ratio is zero. Thanks for playing.

[General Zod]

Actually, I could have gotten a 250 GB cheaper in an inclusive package than a 250 GB Hard Drive and Encloser separately but there were no reviews on the product and who knows who actually makes the hard drives.

Does anyone other than Western Digital, Seagate, or Toshiba make actual hard drives anymore?

There's also Iomega, and maybe a few other smaller companies but for the most part these are the main big groups for hard disks.