External hard drives -what do you have/suggest?

[Hippee]

Hey.

So I want to get an external hard drive - probably either 80,120 or 160. I know about pricegrabber and stuff. Is there any particular thing I should look for. I want USB2.0 and Firewire ports and I want something safe.

What's the best to get? It seems like Maxtor would be good. But I also want somehting a little on the cheap side (under 150, but I could go up to 200). What would be the best Mbps rate for something at this range?

So many questions...

Finally - if you have an external hard drive - what is it and do you like it?

Thank you all.

 

[slerch666]

I have an external drive at work.

It's a Maxtor drive, but the rest of the stuff is manufactured by someone else (ie. drive is Maxtor but the case is labeled with another company's name, can't remember whose).

External drives, at least where I work, tend to crash a lot easier than normal drives. Depending on what you plan on using it for, you may want to reconsider. If you aren't moving it about a lot, you may be fine, but if you plan on swapping it between PCs, you may be better off buying another cheap ass PC, slapping a big ass HDD in it, sticking your PCs on a network and map a drive to the old ass PC with the big drive.

When I say cheap ass PC, I'm talking a cheap ass Pentium/486 or something. You won't be USING the PC, it'll just be like a file server so to speak. You'll have to load an OS on the system, but other than the space that takes up, you're free to play.

 

[Hippee]

I'm at college right now, so I can't really do the 2 comp thing. I need it for art stuff and storing video files for editing - so it would be nice to transport easily between my comp and the school's comps. When they crash does everything get erased? It seems like Maxtor would be safest.

 

[Highlander67]

Honestly, the drives are pretty much all the same build and quality when it comes to external use. Overall, as long as they are not being banged around too much, you should be okay.

 

[phyrexiadamned]

i was looking for the same awhile back
but then i decided to go with an external dvd writer
buy one of them and damn 4.7GB is alot of space for saveing school files and such on

 

[slerch666]

When they crash does everything get erased? It seems like Maxtor would be safest.

When hard drives crash there are many possible reasons. The worst is when the heads physically crash into the platter. If this happens and damage is sustained to the platter, that data is gone. If the heads come into contact with the platters, but it continues to spin, expect to have an unhealthy amount of damage.

Generally, when a drive crashes, your data is GONE. There are recovery services available, but unless you can afford to spend $500-$5000 to recover your data, it's not worth it.

If you wanted to be really safe, go for 2 external drives and keep duplicate data, or keep the data on your main system as well as the external drive. You're less likely to lose everything that way.

 

[Rassilon]

LaCie makes some nice stuff.. I have a 320GB external with Firewire, Firewire 800 and USB2 connections. Its brilliantly fast with FW800.
USB2 kinda sucks donkey dick. even regular FW is better.

 

[KaedesBlade]

I have a Maxtor One Touch 300GB external hard drive. It has never crashed yet. I use it to store all my bootleg shit. So far so good.