External Hard Drives?

[gazzab]

I see that PC World have a good price on a 250gb drive. £79 ?
Is this worth going for ? I have a reasonable amount of photo and video that I would like to ensure is safe. Would you go for this type of soln?

[thepassenger]

£79 for 250gb. Sounds pretty reasonable.

General advice is make sure your laptop has USB2 ports on it, if not get a PC Card that does otherwise you'll find transfering data to be quite slow.
I wouldn't use it as a permament backup device as like all drives it can and eventually will fail.
Don't move it when it's in use and you should be fine though

[FourWheelDrift]

Also don't forget the normal check of making sure your BIOS can read HDD's of that size. If you already have a 250GB or bigger there's no problem but older PC's which maybe only have a 80GB or smaller HDD as standard might need to have their BIOS updated to read larger discs.



Or is that only with Internal drives, are external ones (USB connected) ok?

Edited by FourWheelDrift on Saturday 1st July 00:43

[thepassenger]

Only for internals that one

[Plotloss]

You can just beat it by buying a caddy and a drive seperately and spending 10 minutes putting it together.

If you have a little more cash to play with though, going this route gives you a choice of drive and the ability to choose a known reliable one.

[thepassenger]

Plotloss said:

You can just beat it by buying a caddy and a drive seperately and spending 10 minutes putting it together.

Comparing Sadako's Seagate to the caddy+drive my friend at work had; personally I'd pay the extra... or at least get a decent caddy As this one was just some alu and plastic with screw sockets for the drive, would bend & flex when you picked it up
Sadako's seagate one is pretty solid.