External Hardrive

[Noodles]

I'm looking to buy an external hardrive as my 40 gig on

my Compaq notebook is getting pretty full.

I would like an extra 60-80 gig to store all my video and

music, which would leave my C drive relatively empty.

Can anyone recommend a good one please, price is not really

important.

Thanks for your help

Noodles

[bino]

I had the same situation- 40 GB in my laptop filled up quickly. Amazing when Irecall that my first computer had a 40 MB hard disk.

The best thing to do is buy two items- a good quality hard disk of the size and type you want and an external case / box to put it in.

I've always had good luck / no failures with Seagate drives made in Singapore. They come with 3 year warranty. (Don't get made in China). You have a choice about size. You can go with a 3.5 inch hard disk intended for a desktop PC or alternatively since cost is no object for you, I would recommend that you get a laptop sized hard disk. It is more expensive, but will be smaller and lighter.

Buying an external case/box is no big deal. Most accessory shops have them, in many configurations to fit whichever drive size you buy. USB is the most convenient, but be sure to specify USB 2.0. You can also choose IEEE 1394 (Firewire- considerably faster) which your Compaq laptop probably has, but you will not find this connection on many desktop PCs.

It isn't too difficult to install the drive in the case. You will need to set the jumper connectors on the drive located next to the cable connector to "Drive is Slave". The drive label will show you the correct configuration. If you are unsure about this- get the people who sold you the drive to do it.

One last bit of advice- do keep a copy of anything you really don't want to lose / can not replace (digital pictures for example) on your laptop as well as the external drive, so that if one drive ever dies, you can restore it with the other.

Hope this helps!

[Khun Jean]

If it is for video and music, why not buy an external cd or dvd writer. That way you have unlimited storage and you can make extra copies for backup purposes.

Much cheaper then the external harddisk and as an extra you will be able to make audio(mp3) cd's vcd's and with a dvd writer dvd quality movies.

[lopburi3]

If you go the external hard drive make sure the power supply in the external case can handle the hard drive ( some Seagate seem to be very power hungry compared with WD).

[Noodles]

Thanks for your comments

[bino]

If it is for video and music, why not buy an external cd or dvd writer. That way you have unlimited storage and you can make extra copies for backup purposes.

Much cheaper then the external harddisk and as an extra you will be able to make audio(mp3) cd's vcd's and with a dvd writer dvd quality movies.

An external CD writer is a useful item- great forr backing up digital photos and files in an indestructible format.

For music and videos I still prefer an external hard disk. An 80 GB hard disk holds the equivalent of 100 CDs. The hard disk is much more portable than 100 CDs. Also I like to use Winamp in the random mode, accessing my entire music collection at once instead of shuffling CDs.

I am curious about DVD writer though- still haven't tried one yet. Last time I looked at them they were still quite costly. Buying anything that costs more than 4-5 soapies gives me cause to re-evaluate my priorities!

I do understand that the capacity of DVD-RW is huge, and that the prices have come down. Can anyone tell me the capacity of a blank DVD, and the approximate cost of a DVD writer?

[lopburi3]

Pantip Price lists several external types at about 8,000 baht. Each DVD holds 4.7 GB so that is almost 7 CD's. There is a two side type with twice the storage but have not seen the media advertised for sale yet.

One advantage of a writer is that you can make your own DVD's to play on a normal player for the living room TV. Trying to talk myself into buying one but not quite there yet.

Will add that to have all your memories on a hard drive that IS going to fail at some point may not be the best long term plan. The DVD would give you the ability to have more than one copy of important things at a low cost for media.

Edited April 19, 2005 by lopburi3

[monty]

External drives are still the most cost effective...

An 80 gb drive will cost you 2500 Baht and add some 1300 Baht for a quality external case.

Thats less then 4000 Baht together, compared with the 8000 for an external dvd burner, to wich you still have to add the price of 20 blank dvd's...

A cd burner at 750 mb per cd is not really an option for lots of data, apart for backing up very important stuff. Even then you'll have to be carefull to use the more expensive brand name cd's, as the el cheapo ones can start to decay after a year or even less time!

[Khun Jean]

I still trust my cd/dvd's more than putting it all on an external harddisk. If that thing goes wrong everything is gone.

A dvd holds 4.7 Gb and you als have the double layers that hold 8 gb. For me that is enough. It can hold around 2-3000 mp3's. And if i want to be sure i not lose it i just burn another one and store it in a safe place.

If you go the external harddisk route, buy 2. Have to put a backup somewhere, don't you.

[Firefoxx]

Some things to consider:

A 2.5" external drive is smaller but holds less and is slower. The enclosures are quite cheap, less than 1000 baht each. The drives are quite expensive, at around 4000-6000 baht with a max capacity of 80GB.

A 3.5" external drive can hold up to 300GB and is quite fast. The drives are less expensive, but are larger and may have heat issues if the enclosure is not properly cooled. They usually require external power sources (unlike 2.5" which usually draws power from USB). Prices are much cheaper for the drive, but more expensive for the enclosure (around 1000-1,500 baht).

You can get an IDE DVD writer for around 4,000 baht (top speed) and an external 5.25" box for around 1,500, totalling 5,500 baht for an external writer. But it will be quite bulky, and there will be a power adapter to lug around. There are slim drives, but they're nearly twice as expensive and also have slower speeds. Dual layer media is still too expensive for general use... the cheapest go for around 200+ baht vs cheap single layer media at 20 baht.

Edited April 19, 2005 by Firefoxx

[Ken]

I bought an 80 GB Iomega External Hard Drive (USB 2.0) a few years ago in the US at about $120. Works great with my laptop. Stand alone unit has it's own power supply, auto switching, so I can plug directly into Thailand Power.

Happy with it as a storage and backup unit. Not sure if available in Thailand, however.

[Gary A]

I recently bought a Seagate 7200 RPM 40 gig hard drive. I paid 2,450 baht for it in Loei province. Last week at Panthip I bought a Smart-Drive case for it. It has its own plug in power supply and is USB 2 compatible. It cost 1,480 baht. The same brand case for a laptop hard drive gets its power from the USB itself. (No power supply needed).

I originally bought the extra hard drive for my desktop. My desk top uses ATA serial and this one is a ATA parallel. I couldn't get it to work hooking it up with the ATA serial drive even with a separate cable so buying an external case seemed like a good idea because I can also use it with my lap top.

Since I am now in Jomtien and the hard drive is at the house in Loei I have not had a chance to try it out.

[grahamb]

I've always had good luck / no failures with Seagate drives made in Singapore. They come with 3 year warranty. (Don't get made in China).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I bought a Seagate drive + external case in Pantip last week (it is my backup drive so I'm not as worried about DVD vs hard disk reliability). It had a "Made in Thailand" label and came with a 5 year guarantee. Seagate drives tended to be more expensive than Maxtor but everywhere I checked didn't have the large capacity (200GB) Maxtor drives in stock...

I was told that the enclosure I bought could only handle a hard disk up to 200GB. Not sure why that is the case but I wasn't looking for anything larger anyway (I need the space for digital video - the space on my previous 80GB drive disappeared when I started putting video on it!)

I definitely agree with the comments that an external drive is better than DVDs or CDs. I've got both CD and DVD burners and have never got around to backing everything up to them - there would be a huge pile of disks and I don't want to sit at the PC for ages swapping disks. With an external hard disk, I set the backup process running, disconnect when it's finished and put the data somewhere safe...

[Noodles]

Thanks again for your comments. I think I will go with the external

drive, not sure which one yet. I have recently bought a digital camcorder

so I want to store all the video of family and friends etc.

My plan was to only have it connected to my laptop when I would be

transfering the video across to it, then put it in a safe place. This is new

to me, so I don't know if this would be correct

Thanks again

[autonomous_unit]

Thanks again for your comments. I think I will go with the external

drive, not sure which one yet. I have recently bought a digital camcorder

so I want to store all the video of family and friends etc.

My plan was to only have it connected to my laptop when I would be

transfering the video across to it, then put it in a safe place. This is new

to me, so I don't know if this would be correct

Thanks again

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It all depends on how important your data is, i.e. how much despair you will have when you lose it. Every solution has the risk of data loss, and the safest (and most costly/troublesome) approaches use redundancy to protect you. The super paranoid would keep critical data in more than one format and location, and keep backups to protect against mistakes like deletion of files while drunk or distracted.

In your case, it might make sense to maintain one large drive to conveniently hold all the movies for browsing etc. but keep backups of the movies on the digital camera tape format for archiving in a growing stack of tapes. That way, if the drive fails you have a way to (slowly) rebuild the disk by reading the tapes out again.

Having only one copy on a drive hurts when the drive disappears, whether due to old age, accidental damage, loss, theft, etc. The lifetime of drives is based on some combination of the number of times it is "spun up", the number of hours it is spinning, at what temperatures, as well as storage conditions such as extreme temperature swings, humidity, curious children, etc. Many people think drives are predictable enough so that you can "rotate" data from one drive to another every year or so to always have a nice fresh disk (getting bigger each year for the same price) with everything and one or two older backup disks just in case. This is the kind of thing you can do w/ two USB2 or firewire enclosures so you just keep buying disks every year or two and swapping out an old one. Finding a "SMART tool" program to query the drive for its own health and status can be very helpful when using a method like this. This is done at a larger scale in the industry with whole disk arrays rather than individual disks.

CDs and DVDs do not have unlimited shelf life, and particularly in a place like Thailand. They degrade due to heat and light exposure and also can fail due to strange things like fungus or corrosion attacking the seal and recording layers. The worst part is that they can fail in batches if they were all manufactured in one lot and handled and stored the same way by you. You put it on the shelf with good data on it and months or years later, they cannot be read. Magnetic tape backups can have similar storage problems.

[Gary A]

autonomous_unit made a very good point. I was amazed and upset when some of my CDs were destroyed by a fungus. My girl friend's nephew also scratched some and they too were useless. I have two identical hard drives for my laptop and also two hot swap hard drives for my desktop. I'll trust having two hard drives much further than CDs. Now I will use a USB remote hard drive and use it for the laptop and the desktop. The information on the laptop, the desktop and the remote hard drive will be identical so being protected with three separate hard drives makes me feel quite secure. My girlfriend and her nephew use the laptop and can now use a separate hard drive for his games and her English lessons. The old laptop is an IBM Thinkpad and the hard drive is very easy to swap.

I do have a DVD burner but it takes forever to copy information to disk.

[frequentatore]

but be sure to specify USB 2.0.

What's so important with 2.0? My computer is old and I just bought a printer with USB 1.1. Will I be able to use this printer with any new computer in the future? Thank you. Edited April 19, 2005 by frequentatore

[slimdog]

usb 2.0 is backward compatable. So any usb 1.1 peripherals will still work if you upgrade your computer, but will only work at the original transfer rate.

To make matters a little more confusing the people in charge of standards regarding usb decided to do a little name changing a couple of years ago. Officially usb 1.1 has now been renamed to usb 2.0 (full speed), which has a transfer rate of 1.5 Mb/s. The newest usb is called usb 2.0 (High speed). This has a data transfer rate of 480 Mb/s.

More information on usb can be found at:

http://www.usb.org/faq

[zhongqiang85]

HI there, i need help asap.... i will like to find out the price range for both seagate and samsung hard drive, 60gb and 80gb in bangkok... thanks....

[hereforgood]

At Com center in Pattaya 200 Gig Seagate and box with power supply and fan 4900 Baht 5 year warranty They put together and format for you while you wait 10 Min's

[andyfletch]

HI there, i need help asap.... i will like to find out the price range for both seagate and samsung hard drive, 60gb and 80gb in bangkok...  thanks....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Seagate 80gb notebook drive 5550THB in Pantip, Samsung 80gb ( if you can get one, they had all sold out on Saturday) about 4900. USB 2.0 case 350 THB

[bluebear]

At Com center in Pattaya 200 Gig Seagate and box with power supply and fan 4900 Baht 5 year warranty They put together and format for you while you wait 10 Min's

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Cheapest I could get for the 200Gb Seagate and Acor / Ocor (?) box was 5200B in Fortune. When I saw what the did to connect everythign up it was remarkably easy and I could have done it myself ( this from a man that thinks putting a plug into a socket requires a manual )

The smaller capacity drives are great for business use or photos - they are also far smaller, look smarter and solely powered by usb - but anytime you start saving movies, its going to be swallowed up in weeks. So I went for the big boy with an ac lead. Another cable across the floor but it will take a while to fill.

[lomatopo]

I bought a Seagate 250 GB HDD, and an external enclosure in the U.S. to bring back to Thailand. I just put it together tonight (in the U.S. for a few days), and was surprised to see where the HDD was manufactured, Thailand!

The AMS enclosure is very nice, 100-240v/50-60 hz power supply. And it runs very cool as it has a huge fan, and it is quiet.

[xty]

Just make sure that your external case/box has a good fan to cool down the temperature, especially if you use 3.5" fast (7200 RPM) harddisk. If you need only USB 2.0 interface, there are plenty of models. But if you fancy for USB 2.0 AND firewire WITH fan, good luck to find!

A month ago I've searched EVERY store in Pantip and Fortune, I couldn't find to replace my mis-buy one without fan.

Ok there's only one store in Pantip that maybe sells the one I was looking for, but at that time it was closed (I saw only over the display window). Can't remember the exact store location/name, but surely it's on the left wing at the back.

Don't want my harddisk to melt, at the end I used drill machine to make some holes and put harddisk fan (normally used in PC) outside. Do some cabling and soldering (make sure to connect to 12V one). And finally some transparant sticky tapes to stick the fan to the case/box (don't use permanent glue, in case you want to open the case). And your harddisk will be happy ever after...

Edited November 29, 2005 by xty

[lomatopo]

Just make sure that your external case/box has a good fan to cool down the temperature, especially if you use 3.5" fast (7200 RPM) harddisk. If you need only USB 2.0 interface, there are plenty of models. But if you fancy for USB 2.0 AND firewire WITH fan, good luck to find!

Note that AMS make a 3.5" enclosure with fan supporting both USB 2.0 and Firewire. The model is DS-2316CBK. I am happy so far with my AMS enclosure. It took 5 minutes to assemble the HDD into the enclosure (the power socket is adjustable, so you align that to your HDD). My unit feels to eb room temperature and the fan is prety quiet. They also make a model which supports SATA drives.

[Kremlin]

I have an external Maxtor 300gb that I'm happy with. It has USB 2.0, firewire, and you can password protect the whole drive. Useful to keep tech savvy girls in the dark.

If you have a camcorder and your computer doesn't have a firewire port, some camcorders can download it's media automatically. So you might be able to just connect your camcorder to the external drive and save your video that way.

I dunno if you can get this in Thailand, but here's a new external hard drive in the shape of a LEGO block. LaCie LEGO Drive

Edited November 30, 2005 by Kremlin

[xty]

There's Maxtor OneTouch external harddisk (built-in), but the price is very expensive, up to 1.5-2 times than to buy bare harddisk and enclosure.

Never seen that Lego thing in Bangkok. The price must be as expensive as the Maxtor one.