Thread: External Drive

Seagat or Western Digital drives would be my preference.
Also SATA if looking at a Network Attached (NAS) unit. For a USB or firewire it doesn't matter as much so an IDE drive is OK. For added security look at one that does RAID 1 (mirrored drives) or RAID5 this way a drive can fail and you don't loose everything.

Hope that makes enough sense without getting technical.

Yeah, I'd second Seagate or WD...

seagate = 5yr warranty

wd = 3 year warranty

death rate wd = way more than seagate at the moment

ie buy seagate..

buy an external case and a std 3.5in drive, you get longer warranty than buying a packaged hdd and case as a general rule...

thanks fellas, I'll be spending the extra then.

Inc, do you mean don't buy one of these;
FA_Desktop_product_135x170.gif

if so, what type of case do you mean? not another tower?

you can get external cases that you fit your own separately purchased drive into.

a good quality usb to ide one with switch should be about $45 or thereabouts

For information.

I paid $30 for an Omni USB2 external drive case.
A neat little 2.5 inch notebook drive unit. Slips neatly into a shirt pocket.
The 2.5 inch notebook 40 Gb drive was extra of course.
Don't know the price, it was second hand, and given to me.

Recognised by all the OS's I use.
XP Home and Mandriva Linux on the laptop.
XP Pro Corp, and Mandriva Server on the big machine.


Shorty.

On the subject of building cases, anyone got some info on putting together a 1TB+ RAID5 NAS. Last time I cheated and bought a Buffalo Terrastation but I'm going to need more storage Needs to be 1Gb nic and RAID5 in a headless system.

USB drives don't have the through-put when playing with 4GB transfers.

Very true. (In big writing).


Now I get it.
When you say external drive, you mean big external storage.
With data transfer rates to match.


Shorty.