I am in the process of buying an external hard drive. I would prefer to buy a 250 GB drive and was wondering what i should look for if anything, regarding features or the different types available.
Thanks for your help.
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A 5 year warranty would be nice. The Seagate externals seem to be one of the few external drives with that. I would also look to see what sort of cooling the drive uses. Some get fairly hot in a small enclosure.
If you wanted a faster external, I would look into a eSATA enclosure. It will operate at the same speed as a internal HDD. -
I currently use a Seagate 250GB USB 2.0. Very pleased with it's performance to date - 6 months of constant use. Use it mostly for storing and transfering large (DVD) files.
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for a large drive, and if you are on a windows platform, be sure to format to NTFS and not FAT32
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If I am not wrong, only Vista supports hot plug i.e. plug and unplug without reboot.
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my advice.. SHOP AROUND! you can get a 500 gig external for around $100 if you keep your eyes open! all the smaller drives seem to be a rip-off cost wise.
I am just a worthless liar,
I am just an imbecil -
Originally Posted by pchan
Here is a 500GB from Dell for $110: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=A1119278&cs=19&c=us&l=en&dgc...139&lid=644117Google is your Friend -
Originally Posted by pchan
My eSATA drive hot plugs fine with windows XP. -
Thanks for the advice everyone but can someone please explain this to me.."The ability of hot plugging is dependant on the SATA controller used" or what is SATA ?....i've never heard of this.
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OK, i just ran my mouse over the word SATA and i must say i'm not familiar with this...never heard of it before...but it sounds impressive compared to USB.
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I have 4 of them ranging from 160GB to 500GB. All USB. All work fine including the WD 250 that I have. However, it is my least favorite because it has its own proprietary shut off software. This software doesn't work as good as the standard XP USB method. Best value for USB drives avail now are the 500GB ones. They are always avail somewhere for the magic number of $99.00.
Tony -
Originally Posted by VEBouto
eSATA is the external version of SATA, for connecting external drives. The interface is much faster than USB 2.0 or Firewire.
Hot plugging is the ability to add or remove the drive without shutting down the computer. Obviously, you can't do this with your boot drive but you can do it with data drives.
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