External Hard Drives

[robbain]

I am looking for information or views about External Hard Drives, I am pondering about buying one. Can anyone help?

[ASmith5517]

I have just bought my self a western Digital 120gb passport sized hard drive and it's great.
I store every thing on it and it is compact enough to carry around in my laptop case.

I also have a 250gb one in the house for backing up my main PC, it's bigger but I don't move it around much so it suits me.

It all depends on what your after? portable or just sitting in the house? I bought WD because I find them reliable and quite cheep which is always a bonus.

Hope this is of some help?

PS you can find WD's on Amazon which is the cheepist. ;)

[The Angel Of Death]

Got me a 40 gb usb powered one cracking for saving stuff to and transporting

Best thing i bought

[BMcGillivray]

External hard drives are great for storage, keeping backups on etc... but dont use one as your "main" drive... as in dont install an operating system on one... it'll work, but it'll be nowhere near as reliable or fast as a fixed internal drive.

The other thing to remember is to try not to move it around while its on.

So yeah, definately worth having, i couldn't do without one now.

[Rheghead]

Can it be possible to install and run a game from an external hard drive? The saved games and not to mention all the graphics stuff take so much room up on the computer, I am sure it slows my puter down.:confused

[pultneytooner]

Can it be possible to install and run a game from an external hard drive? The saved games and not to mention all the graphics stuff take so much room up on the computer, I am sure it slows my puter down.:confused
You can install Games/programs on an external HD, this is recommended especialy for movie editing software as there is sometimes a conflict between codecs.

[Saveman]

I've got an external hard drive ide case that connects thru your printer port if anyone wants to give me a fiver for it......

[Kingetter]

Are there not differences in hard drives, other than int/ext or size?

[mareng]

Try a Maxtor "One-Touch" external drive

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/storage/0,39024060,39174901,00.htm

They come with all the software for securing the data and for backing up your pc automatically.

They are USB 2 connected so are pretty quick at transferring data.

Check out Kelkoo for cheapest deals

[Bobinovich]

Can it be possible to install and run a game from an external hard drive? The saved games and not to mention all the graphics stuff take so much room up on the computer, I am sure it slows my puter down.:confused

Yes installing a game will take up hard drive space, but unless it also installs something which runs continuously in the background (highly unlikely unless it's something akin to Steam for online gaming) then it shouldn't slow your computer down.

Also having less hard drive space could effect the amount of virtual memory your system can have (which could in turn slow it down a bit) but that depends on how much space you have prior to installing - modern hard drives are (generally) much larger than most people need so I wouldn't worry about it.

I personally wouldn't install any programs or live data onto an external hard drive - I use them for backup only.

[Tristan]

If you are anything like us we have a number of computers hooked up as a mini-network. If you get a network hard-drive then all the pc's can use it whether or not they are turned on.
Better for a network than a usb hard-drive imho.

[Bill Fernie]

I was in Maplins in Inverness last week and noted an external Seagate 300gb on offer for £99. They had others but that seemed like the best size for the money on offer.

[daviddd]

there's plenty on Ebay too, at around £40 for approx 40GB. Now, that would store 80,000 x 500K photo images!

[The Angel Of Death]

Watch when purchasing them though some of them need an external power source while others are powered by the usb socket

Rough guide is for the usb powered ones there about double the size in price mines was about £80 for a 40 gb usb powered drive