External Hard Drive.

[Gene K]

This has been previously asked in the Hardware Newsgroup but got few
responses so here it is for this group: Good Afternoon (or Morning),

I have both USB 2.0 and Firewire [IEEE 1394] jacks enabled via a PCI card on
a Dell Dimension 8200 (1.9 HZ). I am thinking of purchasing an external Hard
Drive [40 to 120 GB depending on price, 7200 RPM, perhaps 8 MB cache. Would
be used for backup plus storage of rarely used stuff.
Questions:
A. Do they work well? Serve the purpose? Worth the cost?
B. Which brand would you recommend? Model of recommended brand?
C. Good points? Bad Points?

Gene K

 

[Guest]

They work great , I have 4 of them and what else can you
say. There are fast and efficient. Your best Deal is to
buy the case and a harddrive seperate.

-----Original Message-----
This has been previously asked in the Hardware Newsgroup but got few
responses so here it is for this group: Good Afternoon (or Morning),

I have both USB 2.0 and Firewire [IEEE 1394] jacks

enabled via a PCI card
on

a Dell Dimension 8200 (1.9 HZ). I am thinking of

purchasing an external
Hard

Drive [40 to 120 GB depending on price, 7200 RPM,

perhaps 8 MB cache.
Would

be used for backup plus storage of rarely used stuff.
Questions:
A. Do they work well? Serve the purpose? Worth the cost?
B. Which brand would you recommend? Model of recommended brand?
C. Good points? Bad Points?

Gene K

--
Gene K


.

 

[CWatters]

A. Do they work well? Serve the purpose? Worth the cost?

Yes. I use Drive Image from PowerQuest to back up my entire HD (and my wifes
over our LAN) to a USB 2.0 external hard drive every night!. That's about
26 GByte backed up and verified every night.

You can configure DI to keep a certain number of backup images and delete
older ones so my drive never gets full. I also configure it to split the
image into 600MByte chunks so if I really had to I could move one around on
22 CDR or 4 DVD.

A 13GByte backup and verify using DI takes about 45 mins.

SiSoft Sandra says my USB 2.0 drive is about half the speed of my internal
drive which is a similar type. In practice I don't notice much speed
difference when opening files into Word (for example).

I like the idea of having my backup drive on a seperate power supply - that
way if the PSU in my PC fails it won't total both drives at once.

B. Which brand would you recommend? Model of recommended brand?

Choose one that has a good quality drive inside! I made my own by buying a
bare 120 GByte Western Digital Drive and a seperate enclosure.

C. Good points? Bad Points?

Some enclosures won't support drives bigger than 137 gByte (I think that's
the magic number). If you need a bigger drive double check it will work.

Some compact enclosures get rather warm - not ideal for a backup.. Choose a
big metal one with a fan unless you need portability. Some have external
power supplies eg "in the power cable".

You need WinXP SP1 installed to get USB 2.0 support and it matters how you
get to SP1. See here for more info...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;329632&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

My USB 2.0 drive worked very well on my PC from the start, however I had
some interesting technical problems getting my wifes computer to access
shared folders on the External drive over the LAN. I solved them in the end
but I know other people have had the same problem (more info on request to
(e-mail address removed) - remove BOX to get real email address).