New external hard drive
Discussion
I need a new external drive as my Lacie Porsche 80gb Firewire one is about 3 years old now. I use it to serve all of my music at home and if it dies on me I've lost about 600 albums.
I'm tempted to go for another Porsche drive - 250gb - then daisy chain the two and back my Mac and music drive up on it. Alternatively I've seen a few cheap drives of that size (Toshiba, PC World), so I could just grab one of them, but I'm not sure about the quality etc.
Anyone got any recommendations please?
I'm tempted to go for another Porsche drive - 250gb - then daisy chain the two and back my Mac and music drive up on it. Alternatively I've seen a few cheap drives of that size (Toshiba, PC World), so I could just grab one of them, but I'm not sure about the quality etc.
Anyone got any recommendations please?
I've got an IcyBox from www.bigpockets.co.uk
When I brought it it was £135 for a 320gb hd and external enclosure.
When I brought it it was £135 for a 320gb hd and external enclosure.
pmanson said:
I've got an IcyBox from www.bigpockets.co.uk
When I brought it it was £135 for a 320gb hd and external enclosure.
When I brought it it was £135 for a 320gb hd and external enclosure.
Nice!
I wouldn't pay any extra money for "designer" external discs. They don't design or assemble any of the electronics inside the box. I've used a variety of USB and Firewire Maxtor and LaCie external drives. Never had any problems with them. Daisy chaining firewire discs has worked well with my laptop. Probably wouldn't buy anything smaller than 500Gb these days. Discs are cheap!
Mikey G said:
Do you run a network at home? If so i can recommend the Netgear Storage Central which runs on Ethernet only. It comes empty and can be fitted with 2 IDE hard drives of your choice that can be either setup as a total space or mirrored if you worry about losing a drive.
This is the biggest piece of junk you can imagine. Got a refund on one and conveniently Netgaer have closed the forums where you could read all the tales of woe
As cuneus points out not all NAS (Network Attached Storeage) devices are created equal. Their are a lot of cheap n' cheerful ones that for some insane reason require you to install a peice of software to access the thing instead of just presenting a SMB/NFS share you can tap in to. As you can imagine this software is often only Windows based so your stuffed if your using a Mac or Linux.... unless you use a Windows PC to connect and reshare out the drive... bit pointless IMHO.
Often puka-NAS units appear on ebay so it's worth keeping an eye out for them or your can roll your own. Cheap PC (ebay again) filled full of drives running Linux, LVM (software RAID in effect) and Samba does the same job and will talk to anything and multiple computers at once. Need more space? Add drives expand the volume, you can even have multiple volumes for different things (music, movies, personal data, etc.) but one big one is nice as it's fun to see 1TB listed
The external disk packs on the market are pretty neat, Sadako just picked himself up one from Maplins, 160Gb Seagate jobbie. Not the largest but it does get the job done. The only advice I can give about choosing one is the common sense approach: If your going to throw it in your laptop bag and go walkies with it make sure it's reasonably well built and able to take a bit of a beating. Other than that best you can find for the cheapest price usually works.
One peice of advice I picked up on from work and using Sadako's is make sure you eject the disk (i.e. pull up the list of connected USB devices and stop it) before unplugging it and also that Windows can be a sod for releasing them is a program/file is open.... somewhere. A friend I used to work with had the NTFS volume corrupt repeatedly when she just unplugged the device with out warning Windows first.
Edit: I of course mean that its a sod even with the "Disable Write Cache" setting turned on.
Often puka-NAS units appear on ebay so it's worth keeping an eye out for them or your can roll your own. Cheap PC (ebay again) filled full of drives running Linux, LVM (software RAID in effect) and Samba does the same job and will talk to anything and multiple computers at once. Need more space? Add drives expand the volume, you can even have multiple volumes for different things (music, movies, personal data, etc.) but one big one is nice as it's fun to see 1TB listed
The external disk packs on the market are pretty neat, Sadako just picked himself up one from Maplins, 160Gb Seagate jobbie. Not the largest but it does get the job done. The only advice I can give about choosing one is the common sense approach: If your going to throw it in your laptop bag and go walkies with it make sure it's reasonably well built and able to take a bit of a beating. Other than that best you can find for the cheapest price usually works.
One peice of advice I picked up on from work and using Sadako's is make sure you eject the disk (i.e. pull up the list of connected USB devices and stop it) before unplugging it and also that Windows can be a sod for releasing them is a program/file is open.... somewhere. A friend I used to work with had the NTFS volume corrupt repeatedly when she just unplugged the device with out warning Windows first.
Edit: I of course mean that its a sod even with the "Disable Write Cache" setting turned on.
Edited by thepassenger on Sunday 25th June 23:05
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