External Hard drives

[Bruce Page]

I stopped by Best Buy today to pick up an external hard drive when I quickly realized that I don’t know jack about them. Best Buy had 4 different brands to choose from. Who makes the quality drives and who should I stay away from? Is the USB connection fast or at least adequate? I want to move my MP3 and photo files and free up my main drive.

Thanks for any info

[Rich Konopka]

Bruce,

I would recommend that you make SEVERAL backups. I had a Maxtor 1 touch 120GB drive fail after 6 months. Today, I was on the phone with Ximeta on a drive failure. I just don't trust them enough after a couple of failures.

My advice would be to purchase a Western Digital External drive and if you have a DVD burner make backups to some DVD's and store them somewhere safe.

If you have a newer computer it most likely has a USB 2.0 port and is quick as firewire. If you get a USB 2.0 drive it will work with a older USB 1.1 port. It will run slower but it will work.


HTH

[Bruce Page]

Rich, Maxtor was one of the brands that Best Buy had. The others were Seagate, Western Digital & Plextor. My PC is a couple of years old but it does have the USB 2.0 ports.

[Chuck Wintle]

I think the Seagate drives are covered by a 5 year warranty. They have been pretty good(reliability wise) lately.

[Rich Konopka]

Bruce,

I don't think you will go wrong with the WD, Seagate or Plextor. Based on my experience with the Maxtor 120GB 1 Touch failing within 6 months I would stay away from it.

You want 7200 RPM -- Nothing lower

You want seek time ~8ms lower is even better but I doubt you will find that in an external drive.

You want at least 2MB cache Buffer. Some of the Seagate have 8mb which is good.

The WD has a nice shutdown feature which guarantees the cache is written before being shut down.

Do you have a DVD burner? If so make extra backups !!

[Dan McLaughlin]

Bruce:

What Rich said I swear by Western Digital and Seagate. I swear @ Maxtor, both internal and external. Most of the Western Digital externals have a seek time ~8.9ms. This isn't bad. Don't know if Best Buy is the "best price" or whether you can find better "non grey market" price on-line . Good Luck

[Bruce Page]

Thanks for the info guys. Rich, no DVD burner but I can burn CD's. I'll take a closer look at the Seagate, I think they were the most expensive.

[Boyd Gathwright]

Hi Bruce,<O</O

…. I engineer, refurbish and/or build my own computers and/or help the neighbors with there’s. Usually, of late, I decide on the size drive I am considering then I read the latest reviews and pay special attention to the editors reviews, on (cnet.com) or (zdnet.com) or on one of the other no nonsense impartial tech web pages. I get a pretty good idea about what I am looking for from these reviews. It’s nice to go with a SCSI drive, but there is a price to pay, yet the performance is definitely there and you can daisy chain them together. Most likely you will want an IDE or an External USB drive. I would attempt to get one that is highly rated with at lease a three-year warranty and a pretty good seek time, which in your case will most likely be between seven and nine milliseconds. It’s nice to have at least a two MB buffer up to eight MBs, but a lot of that depends on the engineering of the drive, usually the larger the drive the larger the buffer. My last choice a couple of months ago was an IBM internal drive and it had, as I remember, a two MB buffer with eight (something) seek time with a three-year warranty . If you should change your mind about an external drive and decide to go with a CD and/or DVD drive (burner) I would go with a PLEXTOR PX-708A. They’re very reasonably priced and pretty much top of the line. Although, I do not care for the software package that comes with it, which is ROXIO, I much prefer NERO, in my opinion, a far better software package and a lot less bugs.
…. Tried to give you a quick snapshot, hope this helps and is not too over whelming .

Boyd
.

[Bruce Page]

Thanks Boyd, what's your opinion on the IOGEAR or LaCie drives? They have a 160GB external for ~ $140.

[Charles McKinley]

Hi Bruce,

Do you have a walmart nearby? I got my Seagate 120 GB external hard drive there and it was almost $50 cheaper than Staples.

[Keith Christopher]

I would check out the external firewire drives if you have a firewire port on your PC, the throughput is outstanding.

[Boyd Gathwright]

…. Hello Bruce, Not familiar with either of those two drives. I would have to check them out like I suggested in my earlier post.
…. Good luck and would be interested in what you settle on.

Boyd

.

Thanks Boyd, what's your opinion on the IOGEAR or LaCie drives? They have a 160GB external for ~ $140.

[Rich Konopka]

Bruce,

What did you end up getting??

[Bruce Page]

Bruce,

What did you end up getting??

Rich,
I just picked up my PC from the repair shop today. I had a vicious worm called “sms.exe” that required more pc skill that I could muster to remove. I also had them install a 120GB/8meg cache internal HD and do a general tune-up.

The ol’ computer has never run better!I was without PC for almost 5 days (gasp) so I have a lot of catching up to do – 195 new messages when I logged on!

[Chuck Wintle]

Rich,
I just picked up my PC from the repair shop today. I had a vicious worm called “sms.exe” that required more pc skill that I could muster to remove. I also had them install a 120GB/8meg cache internal HD and do a general tune-up.

The ol’ computer has never run better!I was without PC for almost 5 days (gasp) so I have a lot of catching up to do – 195 new messages when I logged on!

Just wondering what brand of drive you ended up installing?