Hard Drives

[TRex]

No not that type..... :o

All you PC geek\'s.....
Recommend me a good External Hard Drive please....

Mainly to keep as a \'back up\' for my Laptop... I don\'t keep a lot on it, no big movies, just a few dirty video\'s and fair bit of PDF\'s files, so nothing too gi-normous needed.
 
 What should I look for and where is best to get such...

And if there is some other new \'tech gizmo\' thats better to store stuff, then educate me gently..

 Cheers

Oh, and no bad language in your replies please..... Thanks

[marcusd666]

My mate has got one of these Click Me was thinking of getting one myself as it works really well and fast to.

Hope this helps.

[Brett]

Lacey knows a bit, might be worth PM\'ing her.

[FD3S Efini]

I had one of those hard drives that\'s been linked(until it got misPlaced) and it was awesome really tough and hard wearing and very fast aswell

Kris

[Lacey]

Hard drives? Depends what kind of hard drive you\'re looking for and the amount of space you need, and the setup of what you want to attach it to.

Firstly before you buy anything you need to establish your speed capabilities.

This is for your laptop, so does your laptop have an eSata port?

If it does, it looks like this, and 50% of the time will be red.



Looking at the middle two, that\'s USB on the left and eSata on the right.

Do you only have USB, or do you have eSata as well?

Either way, you\'ll want a hard drive, and a caddy.

If you want okay storage in a compact form look up laptop hard drives on eBay, they can get up to and including 500 odd GB, common cheap ones are 120 and 240gb, you can also get 320gb ones for not too much, about £40 odd, plus the cost of the caddy.

If you don\'t mind about size you can get a full sized hard drive anything up to about 2.5TB (1TB = 1024GB, 1GB = 1024MB, etc - not implying you\'re stupid and don\'t know this, but you said go slow, so not leaving anything out, so sorry if you already know that bit)

You can pick up normal sized hard-drives that are 1 - 1.5TB for about £60 odd now, the best ones to go for in full sized hard drives are Samsung ones (my opinion only, other brands have let me down, Samsung havn\'t)

If you want a smaller more compact one, you want a 2.5" hard drive from a laptop - capable brands are Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung - avoid any budget brands, IBM do okay drives too, but those are the only four I;d honestly buy.

Before somebody starts ramblinf on about solid-state drives, they\'re bloody expensive for sod all storage space and end up screwing themselves over faster than normal HDD\'s because they\'re just flash memory.

Any questions so far?

[grinder]

there was one on amazon for about £150

My be overkill for what you need but it was an NAS Box ( connects to your home network )

It has 2*1TB drive - each one mirrored onto the other one - so if one fails , you plug in another one in the housing and it rebuilds your data

Failing that - just a time external HDD ( £50 for 1TB from comet )

Not as safe in real terms - but prob does the job just aswell

[Ricco_04]

If you dont store that much stuff just get one of those USB dongles - I have an 8gb one which is great.  I know they go to 16gb last time I looked so probably even bigger now.

They take up no space, you need no leeds & you also dont need a power supply as it takes it from the computer

[- Fezcat -]

I bought a 1tb internal drive - E-sata case :thumbs: Job done

[grinder]

If you dont store that much stuff just get one of those USB dongles - I have an 8gb one which is great.  I know they go to 16gb last time I looked so probably even bigger now.

They take up no space, you need no leeds & you also dont need a power supply as it takes it from the computer

We looked today at work .. you can get 256GB ones now ( just dont look at the price of them ! )

[AMH]

I used to swear by Western Digital passports, got about four like the WD3200ME. All still working fine and great for extra storage - just plug in and go. I never used the back up software that came with them though.

But then they brought out the new ones like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Passport-Essential-Real-Portable-Drive/dp/B004445JHW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310389255&sr=8-1 I brought a lovely shiney red 500gb one for under £100 with a docking station but I sent it back as I couldn\'t get the back up software to work properly and you can\'t delete it off and just use it as extra storage easily. So I got a very nice Samsung one instead and it was cheaper with a free move: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0034G60O2/ref=oss_product

If you are just after back up though I use Carbonite and it\'s fab - there\'s even an App so I can access all my files (including photos and music) via my iPhone. So it depends wheather you want back up or extra space.

[ChrisDubbya]

I wouldn\'t recommend a USB dongle, when they break you have pretty much no chance of recovering your data at least with a good old fashioned HDD not solid state as Lacey mentioned a bit of corruption can cause you problems with the right \'free\' tools you can save most of it - obviously backing up is best.

I can also second Lacey\'s samsung recommendation, just decide how small you want it and either go cheap and get a full size drive and caddy or a laptop drive and caddy.

One thing on the USB vs eSATA if you are going to move it around and use on friends computers it might be worth considering sticking with USB just for compatibility

[TRex]

Lacey you lost me at \'Hello\'..... :confused::confused::confused:

 Some of the replies were like reading a Korean novel.....  \'I don\'t speak Korean!\'

Mine hasn\'t got one of those eSATA thingys, but think I\'ll look into what marcusd666 linked up....  Looks simple, it\'s recommended and already linked for me to hit \'add to basket button\'... :Thumbs-up

 You guys feel free to carry on the discussion...   my head hurts

 Thanks

[TRex]

Guys/Gals, I had a look at that link and checked reviews, apparently it does not fare well....
 so now have a better idea of what to look for and came up with this... \'click clicl\'

 Please advise....     (it seems to be more or less suited to my needs)

[- Fezcat -]

Never been a massive fan of WD if im honest - the Two WD HDD\'s ive had have failed very quickly.

I had an iomega 500gb external which saw me through uni, going everywhere got dropped etc - never broke!

have a peer here

http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/all/hard-drives-ext/750gb-3tb

[TRex]

Dam it Fezcat!

 Argghhh, anyone else... :p

 I doesn\'t need to be portable, physcial size doesn\'t matter (so they say), not worried about looks or style.. just something easy to use and reliable to store the contents of my Laptop as a backup...