Portable hard drives

[cannabis campbell]

cool thanks craig

how much did it cost you?

cannabis campbell Reviewed by cannabis campbell on 07-06-2007. Portable hard drives Ok heres a question for the people who know their stuff on computers.. at the moment i just have a shitty laptop with only 30GB space on and i want to buy a portable hard drive for it does anyone know how they work? Is it just as simple as dragging the files onto it or is it much more complicated? How many wires does it come with is it just the USB? Thanks :) Rating: 5

[Raelum]

hey there, i would suggest "building" your own external harddrive... it has a few advantages, for one if you ever get a desktop you can remove the harddrive from your external enclosure and put it inside your desktop, and if you ever have
more then one internal harddrive you can swap them out of your case (for example your desktop breaks and you left important documents on your harddrive, you can take the harddrive out and put it in your external case and access those files)....

i made a 300GB setup for like $120 about 2-3 years ago, and harddrives have dropped in price alot since then...

heres links to what i got for comparison.
Newegg.com - Open Box: Maxtor MaXLine III 7V320F0 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
i had a slightly older model with only 300 GB, and this has 320 for way cheaper then mine was! This is also SATA which is currently the cutting edge for harddrives. (WAY faster then IDE and ATA)

Here is a list of external enclosures... i would personally get a SATA harddrive with an external enclosure that supports both SATA and IDE (but you really only need SATA, but having both options is always nice)
Newegg.com - Buy Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, Digital Cameras and more!

as far as installing it, all you have to do it plug in the harddrive (easy as plugging in a power could) and plug the USB in the laptop, the laptop should detect it automatically...

as far as formatting your harddrive, i would suggest FAT32 for compatibility, This will allow you to use your harddrive on nearly every system, windows, mac, linux, your xbox (ask if you want to know )

hope this helps,
Raelum:smokin:

[Its a Plant]

Woohoooo...so my external drive FINALLY came in today..

I ended up going cheap lol, and since I don't know much about brands, I went with a Western Digital 500gig for a whopping $100. I couldn't pass that up.

Lol as of now all of my music is taking 4 hours to transfer over to it. Jesus. :jointsmile:

[cannabis campbell]

Good news plant!!, oh well at least after that 4 hours your computer will be a hell of a lot faster!!

Thats a bargin for $100, did you get it of the internet or a shop?

Tell me what its like when you finally sort it out, is it simple to just save music and movies and stuff directly to there and play it back just as fast?

[Its a Plant]

Okay so almost all of the stuff I want to store on there is on there....shit like music, movies, pictures, documents...

It's pretty easy to access, at least from mine. When it's plugged in, (I have an iMac btw), there's just an icon that says "My Book". I click it and anything that's on there is easy as hell to find. It's a little different getting used to, I will say that.

I've yet to notice a change in speed at all, but I dunno...In either case NOW I'll have room for a shit ton more music. :jointsmile:

[cannabis campbell]

Oh by the way i got that spiderman 3 for you man

[babystarbud]

im buying one for my dads laptop tomorrow, its a toss up between these three...

Buy 250GB Freecom USB2 3.5" Hard Drive 27035 from CCL - Online Retailer of the Year 2006


Buy 320GB LaCie Hard Drive 300968EK from CCL - Online Retailer of the Year 2006


Buy 320GB Western Digital My Book Essential WDG1U3200E from CCL - Online Retailer of the Year 2006

[babystarbud]

Ended up buying this drive in the end, turns out the old man is more of a spec junkie than me, lol

500GB freecom for £82

its a nice little unit and cheap for the money, very quiet in operation as it has no fan...apparently the Alu case act as the heat sink so it dosent need a fan.

very smart little unit and looks much better in the flesh

[Sensi Super Skunk]

Okay so almost all of the stuff I want to store on there is on there....shit like music, movies, pictures, documents...

It's pretty easy to access, at least from mine. When it's plugged in, (I have an iMac btw), there's just an icon that says "My Book". I click it and anything that's on there is easy as hell to find. It's a little different getting used to, I will say that.

I've yet to notice a change in speed at all, but I dunno...In either case NOW I'll have room for a shit ton more music. :jointsmile:

A desirable speed change will occur after defragmentation of the hard disk drive(s) takes place.

I have always assumed that the process of disk defragmentation took place in the background [automatically] of Mac OS X.

When you have provided your notebook with the appropiate space needed to defrag, it will commence assume.

[Sensi Super Skunk]

About disk optimization with Mac OS X