Recomend me an extrenal hard drive

Originally Posted by Viney

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, 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.

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

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.

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 ?

Mine is a usb one with a seperate power source.

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

Originally Posted by 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 ?

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