5punk

Just ordered myself one of these off www.ebuyer.com

Freecom 500GB External USB2.0 16MB Cache Hard Drive - Retail


That's a lot of external storage for a £100, and ideal for taking round friends and relatives houses to work or share files with them.

Wondered if any other 5punkers have dealt with external hard drives and had an opinion on them?

I have one called Geoff

I am currently 'borrowing' it from work, and have been for many months.

It's alright, mines a toshiba one which is a bit noisy and turning it on every time I turn on the PC is a bit annoying but it has proved useful in taking round to mates or to my parents.

Although I'd probably rather have an internal one and just use usb sticks or DVD-RW's to transport stuff around, it's just that it was free... erm sort of!

ive got a 250gb mybook. its good for getting files and stuff around but i find it sometimes slow if u wanna install games or anything big like that onto it. pretty good for music, documents and a load of crap that you dont want on your pc hard drive

I use a couple of Phillips ones and a Maxtor, they are generally okay as long as you don't need fast access times, and don't put anything system-critical on them (swap files or open programs).

I leave them on and plugged in almost all the time, but very occasionally they disconnect and appear to have failed and need to be plugged into another machine before the original one will recognise them again.

Run it direct from a USB port on your machine, unless you have a hub which supports full speed simultaneously across all ports - most do not.

Use one of those make your own enclosures (around £15) and If you can, use eSata.

I have a 120gb iomega one which i bought a couple of years ago when i first started uni and discovered bit torrent and onl had a 40gb hard drive in my computer

its pretty great and has served me very well

Self powered 2.5" enclosures for my win, as the above poster said, they cost about £15 If you have a spare 2.5" drive lying around it's obviously a no brainer

Then use drives that need less than 500mA or get an enclosure that has a second USB power cable if the drive in question needs to draw more.

But enclosures as a rule will give you more "bang per buck" as well as you can change the drives easily when that 1Tb drive drops to £50

Downside with 2.5" enclosures is that 2.5" drives are smaller and more expensive than 3.25" drives.

I have a 250GB Lacie external drive - the Porsche Design one, not the one that looks like Lego. It's worked fine so far, and it was reasonably cheap - $110 or so as I recall, just over 6 months ago.