Can anyone give me a recommendation for a decent priced (and efficient) external hard drive? I've nearly filled my company issued Macbook near maximum capacity with anime and other random shenanigans; I'd rather hold on to them than resort to massive obliteration. Help me, o' kind denizens of the AP forums.
Help regarding an External Drive…
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Ah, my noobishness just shone, for starting this thread in the wrong area. Gah.
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I got a pretty good external HD for like 100 dollars
it holds like 300 gigs
the bigot who thinks being an asshole is actually worth shit
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Brand? Make? Place?
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Here's what you do. Goto newegg.com and buy a regular HD to go in a computer. I bought a 500 gig for under $100.
Then buy an enclosure for said drive. They can range from $20-30. I have a Metal Gear Box, it's very nice and conserves space.
So basically you can buy a nice external for under $150. Plus, it's more reliable than say a Lycie or a Maxtor. Fully customizable, it's great. -
Just checked out the site–very nice, very nice. Thanks, Mr. Dude.
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so I asume, the HD would plug in to this external enclosure thing, and then you can plug in the enclosure via USB, just like a regular external HD. cool. I'll have to try this. Hey, can you find these enclosures in stores? I like to see stuff before I buy it.
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Yes, you can find them in shops. If you have a shop like Micro Centre or Fry's Electronics locally, you'll probably have a better chance of getting one than at say, Best Buy. Other shops are more prone to sell a fully-assembled packaged unit)
One thing you might look into is what connections are available:
eSATA > FireWire 800 > USB 2.0 ~=~ Firewire 400 > USB 1.1
USB 2.0 is the most prevalant option, and if you drag it to your old Celeron 400 box, it will fall back to USB 1.1 speeds. Macintoshes generally offer both USB and Firewire.
Sometimes you can get a drive carrier which supports eSATA AND USB 2.0 AND/OR FireWire.
Generally, the enclosures which take 3.5" hard drives (desktop size) also require a power brick.
You can sometimes get ones with 2.5" (laptop size) drives inside which will run entirely off USB, but laptop drives cost more per gig and are slower.
It's also a great way to reuse drives if you upgrade– I put my 160Gb drive in one when I upgraded to a 250Gb drive (primarily because I needed a SATA drive for a new mainboard, and the price difference was tiny)
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Another cool thing about firewire is that you can run your system on it, unlike usb. Also firewire tend to be better at everything than usb.
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make sure the new drive don't run on FAT32… (was really annoying finding out i needed to remove ~30gig i just put on my new external when i already filled up the empty space i got on the regular HD.)
For some reason the instruction book was very vague about which system it was using. And lacking both instructions and knowledge how to easily reformat I assumed it was ready to use.
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One thing you might look into is what connections are available:
eSATA > FireWire 800 > USB 2.0 ~=~ Firewire 400 > USB 1.1
USB 2.0 is the most prevalant option, and if you drag it to your old Celeron 400 box, it will fall back to USB 1.1 speeds. Macintoshes generally offer both USB and Firewire.
Sometimes you can get a drive carrier which supports eSATA AND USB 2.0 AND/OR FireWire.
@_@ oh god. now i'm in over my head. XD maybe I should just stick with an Ex HD and save myself the headache. not like I need it atm anyways.
