External Hard Drive

[polecat]

Am going to have to bite the bullet and reinstall Windows on my creaking old laptop. Have decided to use this as an excuse to buy a big fat External Hard Drive to store pix/music etc.

I reckon on something around 200 Gig that will last forever and I wonder if anyone has any suggestions. I could go down to Fortune Town/Panthip and buy a drive and box seperately, or I could go for a Seagate 250G which I have seen in a department store knocked down to 4,900 baht.

Is there a difference between brands, or should this purely be a price decision?

[Firefoxx]

A 320GB Seagate SATA 7200RPM 3.5" HDD will cost you around 3,200 baht. A 3.5" SATA enclosure to put it in will cost another 1,400 baht. Grand total of 4,600 baht, and you've got even more storage.

The "ready-made" external drives that come complete are usually marked up quite a bit compared to buying the components separately and putting them together (it's not rocket science to do this). Even more so for a deparment store (don't buy computer parts at these places if you want a bargain).

There is another option, and that is e-SATA. The advantage of e-SATA is that it's basically the same speed as normal SATA, it's just an external connection. 3gigabits per second, compared to around 400 megabits per second for USB2/Firewire. Problem is that you'll need an eSATA port (can be converted from a normal SATA port) in your computer/laptop, but there are cards that do this. Of course, if you don't need speed (probably not, just for pix/music), then it's probably overkill.

[lopburi3]

Don't know if Maxtor drives are still available but the power usage when I compared with Seagate last year was much, much less for competitive models. Agree that it is probably cost effective to buy and put together - just remember that drive has to be formated before you will see a letter assigned by Windows.

[higgy88]

I had exactly the same questions a while back, and I went with the 160 GB Maxtor external hard drive. The reason was pretty simple, it looked strong. There was a thread on this forum a while back from someone who had an internal hard drive in a case and had it sitting on a chair, and it fell to the floor. It would no longer even spin and he was crying for help on how to retrive his data. The external hard drive I bought just looks like it could take a few knocks, although I have absolutely no intention of testing that theory. But I will say that IMHO external hard drives are made to be portable while internal hard drives are not. It's not just a matter of putting it into a case. And just remember, no matter what you get now, it is going to be much cheaper and much bigger in a very short period of time.

[pumper]

how you format & partition the drive will determine where you can plug it in.

if you think you will ever want to hook it up to a win 98 / me box it must be formated / partitoned for those Oss.

never intend to hook up to an old box then this post should be ignored

i have taken my hd to friends houses to exchange mp3s... + one guy had a ton of "conspiracy" / Area 51 type fringe wacko videos .. he seemingly swears by & will argue about any & all off center conspiracy theories.

so quick to move files to / from a HD recognized by the "other computer's" file management software.

fun toy.

[Firefoxx]

External hard drives are just internal hard drives put inna box. It's not really complicated. Some of the boxes have padding, but it's still a plain-vanilla hard drive sitting inside. It might or might not survive a fall, depending on a lot of things, but it's not because it's external.

Maxtor was taken over by Seagate some time ago (around a year or so). I miss their drives, but you can see them as Seagate's new drives. Pretty much the sam design as Maxtor's old drives.

The old OS argument is double-pronged. Formatting for an old OS means that you can't do certain things, like go beyond 2GB per file (a DV video file is 12GB per hour of footage, and a DVD ISO image can be 4-8GB, while a HD-DVD rip can be 40+ GB). It also means that you can't put a lot of files in the root directory. Of course, there is a perk, and that is access to many many itty bitty files is faster.

Edited June 6, 2007 by Firefoxx

[higgy88]

Firefox. I've certainly repected your opinion over the years, and you may as well be right about external hard drives vs. internal hard drives in a case. I can go to the market and buy some eggs, which they just put in a plastic bag. Or I can go to Lotus and buy some eggs which are put in a specially designed plastic egg box. The eggs are the same, but it does make me feel safer when I buy the ones from Lotus and put them in the basket of my Honda for the ride home.

[polecat]

Cheers people. I've gone with a 250G Western (2350 baht) slotted into a box (750 baht) from Fortune Town. If all goes well, this will have saved me about 2,000 baht. many thanks for your input.

[astral]

A 320GB Seagate SATA 7200RPM 3.5" HDD will cost you around 3,200 baht. A 3.5" SATA enclosure to put it in will cost another 1,400 baht. Grand total of 4,600 baht, and you've got even more storage.

This is exactly what I bought 2 weeks ago for backing up films. Approximately the same price.

It is super.

I was offered a Western at the same price but declined, having had TWO WD disk fail on me in the past.

So I do not trust them at all

[Firefoxx]

Really, what you feel is what you feel. There are many types of enclosures, and you could buy an even better enclosure than the ones chosen by the various hard drive manufacturers. But again, it's the exact same hard drive inside, not a different one. Really, you might think it looks strong, but it doesn't guarantee it'll survive a drop any more than an aftermarket enclosure. Several years back, Seagate cashed in on the comsumer view of hard drives by adding some rubber padding to their 3.5" desktop drives. In many ways this is ludicrous. The percentage of drives used in enclosures was miniscule, and the time spent handling them was near nil. That means that most drives spent pretty much all their lives safe and secure screwed inside a PC. Even if it were used in an enclosure, the padding wouldn't help since it didn't actually cover the impact areas inside. This is marketing at work... do something to make it look good when it doesn't really do anything. Of course, Seagate dropped the ridiculous rubber padding after only one series.

I'm an engineer and I tend to look at what really works and what doesn't, and if it's cost effective. But if it gives you peace of mind, by all means, go for it.

[steffi]

Ok if you go to any iStudio (Mac reseller) you'll find several makes of external enclosures ... a lot of them are distributed by SNA technology. then you just go to Panthip and add your own drive. I did this last time wth a mapower enclosure from panthip 3rd floor KTC (whatever they are called... big malaysian fish in the tank).

I strongly recommend you stick with Mac dealers as then you'll get good chipsets in the enclosure. Avoid all the generic USB 2.0 rubbish that's out there.

Fortune town has a lot of mac dealers who also stock different enlcosures.

I was in the iStudio at Central World just yesterday and I think they were selling about 3-4 different enclosures.

Really, what you feel is what you feel. There are many types of enclosures, and you could buy an even better enclosure than the ones chosen by the various hard drive manufacturers. But again, it's the exact same hard drive inside, not a different one. Really, you might think it looks strong, but it doesn't guarantee it'll survive a drop any more than an aftermarket enclosure. Several years back, Seagate cashed in on the comsumer view of hard drives by adding some rubber padding to their 3.5" desktop drives. In many ways this is ludicrous. The percentage of drives used in enclosures was miniscule, and the time spent handling them was near nil. That means that most drives spent pretty much all their lives safe and secure screwed inside a PC. Even if it were used in an enclosure, the padding wouldn't help since it didn't actually cover the impact areas inside. This is marketing at work... do something to make it look good when it doesn't really do anything. Of course, Seagate dropped the ridiculous rubber padding after only one series.

I'm an engineer and I tend to look at what really works and what doesn't, and if it's cost effective. But if it gives you peace of mind, by all means, go for it.

[INTJ]

Hi,

Just for information I bought a Hitachi (supposedly more reliable than Seagate) 250 gig for 2300 and a 'Tsunami' case for 1100 at Com Mart yesterday. 3400 all in, seems pretty reasonable and its working fine. The shop put it in the case for me.

Cheers.

[Gary A]

A 320GB Seagate SATA 7200RPM 3.5" HDD will cost you around 3,200 baht. A 3.5" SATA enclosure to put it in will cost another 1,400 baht. Grand total of 4,600 baht, and you've got even more storage.

This is exactly what I bought 2 weeks ago for backing up films. Approximately the same price.

It is super.

I was offered a Western at the same price but declined, having had TWO WD disk fail on me in the past.

So I do not trust them at all

I have had two Seagate hard drive fail on me in the past four years. Both were smaller drives (80 and a 60) and both were 7,200 RPM. I think they are guaranteed for three years but it wasn't worth the hassle. I have no brand loyalty now.

[Firefoxx]

You shouldn't have brand loyalty. Brands mean nothing. Even for support, they mean nothing, because support can vary greatly with time and by product. Go on a product-by-product basis. If you have brand loyalty, you simply have fallen prey to very cunning marketing.

I never go to Mac dealers, because they sell all the same things for 30-200% more than other places. Macs (and to some extent their third-party products) are the kings of marketing. But that's how I feel. YMMV.

[meadish_sweetball]

My experience of hard disks rings 100% true with what Firefoxx is saying here.

I bought an external iOmega 250 GB drive 3 years ago. It worked for 2 years and then the fan failed. There was no replacement fan to be found. I opened the case and just as Firefoxx says, sure enough inside was a regular 250GB Hitachi hard disk. I took it out of the case and mounted it in a desktop computer, and it worked for another few months before failing completely on me.

Now I have a desktop computer and don't need an external hard disk anymore, but if I had to do it all again I would not buy one of the ready-made options as they just cost a lot more money.

I think he is right about not trusting brands too. Google did some major testing of different hard disks not too long ago, and the results indicated that overall failure rates were about the same for the major brands, i.e. Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung and Hitachi.