Recomend me an extrenal hard drive

[Viney]

Im after a 500gb external hard drive. My mate, who knows about these thing said a LaCie 500gb unit.

So opinions please.

[Filipe M.]

Might do. Western Digital do good ones for a good price too, check out the Essentials or MyBook series.

[Sudoxe]

As above, mybook or lacie, both good products (i've only used a mybook though)

Dan

[Grinch]

Looking on hotukdeals.com

LaCie 500GB £53.98 (http://www.hotukdeals.com/deal/51856/lacie-500gb-external-hard-drive-53-)

[ooger]

We got a 500gb Lacie Ethernet Disk Mini which is networked as well as with USB connection. Its handy if you for example want to access your legit movie downloads on your telly while your PC is off.

Very good http/web user interface too.

(If you're looking to mirror them or expand at a later date though be careful, we also got another 500gb Lacie USB disk and will it heck recognise its plugged in to the ethernet one making it ~1Gb.)

Personally I'd recommend an ICY BOX external caddy, and a standard big-as-you-can-buy fast (7200rpm) IDE disk. Much cheaper, and just as reliable, just USB though.

HTH

[timwilky]

for my laptop I bought a SATA card and then a SATA/USB external enclosure and a 500GB Seagate drive.


I wanted SATA all the way as a damm sight faster than a usb bottleneck

[Viney]

Mines only going tobe for extrnal sotrage of 500gb's of music, so not really het up on speed. I have used a mteas Maxtor item, and that worked a treat for listening to the tunes.

Grinch, thats a cracking deal, even better with the £10 off is you use google checkout. Job done. However, it isnt the Porsche desgin one, but i'll let you off.

Cheers mate.

[Viney]

So then, got my LaCie 500gb drive.

Its formated FAT32 and at 465gb. Why? Shouldint it be neaer 500gb and NTFS?

Helps

[gettin2dizzy]

It depends on what size files you are storing, as for the capacity that's just a bitch. It means 5000 000 bytes, which equated to 465Gb. A marketing trick used by every firm.

[Viney]

It depends on what size files you are storing, as for the capacity that's just a bitch. It means 5000 000 bytes, which equated to 465Gb. A marketing trick used by every firm.Music only

[ooger]

So then, got my LaCie 500gb drive.

Its formated FAT32 and at 465gb. Why? Shouldint it be neaer 500gb and NTFS?

Helps

NTFS vs FAT is a different matter (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/russel_october01.mspx), the reason 500Gb is not equal to 500gb is threefold.

First the overhead: almost every storage device needs a certain small but noticeable amount of its storage capacity to organize itself, i.e., contain directors, file tables and the like. This size/space needed is relative to the size of the device.

Second, damage: Nothing is usually perfect, even if its brand new. Operating systems know this with physical storage and when they find bad bits on a disk drive, they just flag them and write around them, effectively writing them off forever (or until its formatted, and even then itll probably do the same). OS's don't tell you about this unless you badly lose data (that it can't salvage correctly and write elsewhere, they do this without telling you too) because of it, in which case you're kinda screwed.

Third, the lie: Mega and Giga have been seriously perverted. "Back in the day" when nearly everyone using a computer was a computer geek, the convention was that Mega meant 2^20 (i.e., 1,048,576) and Giga meant 2^30 (1,073,741,824), and some people used mega and giga (notice lower case) to mean one million and one billion, respectively. Digital camera manufacturers have talked Megapixels when they meant megapixels. So now we're at the point when some people say Megabytes or MB when they mean megabytes (mB), etc. Note that 500 gigabytes is only about 477 Gigabytes.

Now take away from 500 about 2-3% for formatting, other overhead, and bad sectors, and you're at the 465 GB you mentioned.

Don't feel conned, its sadly the norm.

[gettin2dizzy]

FAT32 is quicker for small files like music, but tbh I'd still use NTFS. It's just that bit more reliable.

[Sosha]

Plus 1 for ntfs....

[Viney]

Ta. Formating as we speak.

However, onto Memory. I have 2 512mb sticks of Corsair XMS platinum DDR400 ram. Now i want to add another gig of ram. Can i put any DDR400 ram in there? Im thinking of some Corsair XMS but not the silver stuff, its dearer than when i bought it 2 years ago!!!

[embee]

Got a 320G Seagate from Maplins a while back for £59, works a treat.

[stewie]

I am thinking of doing this to store slides, negatives and old photo,s, do you just simply plug into the Usb connection and leave alone ?

[Stig]

Mine is a usb one with a seperate power source.

[redbouy]

One of the nice things about the caddy system. is you can take it out of the caddy and install it inside the desktop. Speeds up the transfer a bit.
I use all my old HD's as storeage and just swap out disk's as I need some old data

[Spiderman]

I like this one myself

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10695

[ooger]

I am thinking of doing this to store slides, negatives and old photo,s, do you just simply plug into the Usb connection and leave alone ?

Yarp. Just plug it in and you get another drive (B : in my case.

[Pedro68]

+1 to the Seagate one from Maplins - bought one when they were on offer ;-)

Plug n play baby :)

(it has separate power connecter as mentioned).