external hard drive

[Azeral]

Does anyone own one? am I beter off buying a pre built one or making one from a hard drive and a case? Also what is a good size for a hard drive (i was think around 120 gig). Also i see a lot of problems with combining Western digital hard drives and most external cases should i avoid western digital hard drives if i build my own. Price is around 150 - 200 bucks australian.

[ 08-03-2005, 07:10 PM: Message edited by: Azeral ]

[Zebodog]

I picked up a generic case at my local PC shop, and used a spare 80GB WD I had laying around. The case kit cost about $30CDN a year ago.

I haven't had any problems with the Western Digital, in fact I have found their drives to be the most reliable.

I don't know if I would go too big depending on the type of case you are using. The newer drives, especially the big and fast ones generate a lot of heat. Most of the case kits list recommendations for drives.

It's a lot cheaper than buying an external around pre-built.

[Ilander]

Yeah...I've had my external for three years; it's a Que Drive, and is reliable, but makes more and more noise as it ages...and it's starting to get small, at only 40 Gb.

They're handy to have, though for HUGE files USB 2 is a little bit slow. For instance, transfering movie-files.

[Gabrielles blades]

i got a dvd ram drive recently that i think is really cool; basically it allows me to have unlimited external hard drive space.
Reason i got this is because my 300GB drive crashed on me so i lost all of my data

I heard most hard drives last only a few years because their size makes them unstable; hard drives made a loooong time ago that were much much smaller are a lot more reliable than the huge hard drives of today.

dvd ram uses special dvds that act like hard drive discs; so you can copy and paste & delete in windows explorer - its just a lot slower to transfer the files and each disc is only like 4-9GB depending on if you get single or double sided discs.
the dvd ram discs come in a neat special cartridge that you insert into the drive - that way they wont ever get scratched. According to my brother this is better data security than a RAID system.

its too bad this system is unpopular or it would be cheaper; costs quite a pretty penny for the drive; and the discs arent that cheap either, but i figure its worth it since id just end up losing all of my data again if i bought another hard drive.

[Azeral]

I have a DVD burner that supports RAM but finding a disk is next to impossible. I ended up buying a pre built external hard drive from ALDI for $199 AUS (250 gig, 8 meg cashe, usb2, firewire 400,7200rpm) cause it worked out cheaper than one i could build my self.