External USB Hard Drive- Advice

[Blair]

I am thinking of buying a Western Digital External 80GB 7200 RPM , 2MB cache
HD from Amazon for £87.76 which looks a reasonable buy.
I will be using it to backup my 4 Partitions with Acronis True Image on my
Dell Inspiron1100 laptop
My Laptop has a 27 GB HD but the whole system at present is about 5GB so I
think the 80 GB will be OK
Are there any snags or pointers which I should consider?

Blair Malcolm

 

[Paul Smith]

I am thinking of buying a Western Digital External 80GB 7200 RPM , 2MB
cache
HD from Amazon for £87.76 which looks a reasonable buy.
I will be using it to backup my 4 Partitions with Acronis True Image on my
Dell Inspiron1100 laptop
My Laptop has a 27 GB HD but the whole system at present is about 5GB so I
think the 80 GB will be OK
Are there any snags or pointers which I should consider?

Nup it will just plug-n-play. Windows should detect it, install drivers for
it and it will simply be listed in My Computer as another hard drive, to any
peice of software it will just seem like a hard drive (in theory). ;-)

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
http://windows.dasmirnov.net/ Windows XP Resource Site.

*Replace nospam with smirnov to reply by e-mail*

 

[JAX]

Paul is "right-on". I use the same system that you propose, except my WD
drive is 8MB cache, you may want to check the price difference between the 2
and 8MB drives. There is a noticable difference in the preformance between
the two.

LOL, JAX

 

[Michael Ortega]

Hello Blair,

I would recommend getting an external hard drive enclosure, and then
getting an internal hard drive. For one the internal drive will be cheaper
and if you ever needed a bigger drive you can just get another internal
drive. Also I think that its cheaper in total then a "normal" external hard
drive.

Michael Ortega

 

[Rock]

I am thinking of buying a Western Digital External 80GB 7200 RPM , 2MB cache
HD from Amazon for £87.76 which looks a reasonable buy.
I will be using it to backup my 4 Partitions with Acronis True Image on my
Dell Inspiron1100 laptop
My Laptop has a 27 GB HD but the whole system at present is about 5GB so I
think the 80 GB will be OK
Are there any snags or pointers which I should consider?

Blair Malcolm

Some external drives come formatted as Fat32. FAT32 has a single file
size limit of 4GB. So depending on low large the backup file gets you
might not be able to create it on the external drive. You can convert
it to NTFS if that's the case. For now with a total space used of 5GB,
with compression you should be well under the 4GB limit.

 

[Blair]

Some external drives come formatted as Fat32. FAT32 has a single file
size limit of 4GB. So depending on low large the backup file gets you
might not be able to create it on the external drive. You can convert
it to NTFS if that's the case. For now with a total space used of 5GB,
with compression you should be well under the 4GB limit.

Thanks for you help. That's the sort of information which is helpful.
I noticed that my original message is not displayed on my list. This seems
to happen on other messages.
Is there an explanation?
Blair

 

[Edward W. Thompson]

I use True Image to image to an external USB HDD that is formattted
FAT32. The Image is bigger than 4GB and the program (True Image)
automatically breaks the Image into two files. I wouldn't format an
external drive NFTS as it restricts its use to machines that read that
format and does not offer any 'real' advantages.

 

[Rock]

Thanks for you help. That's the sort of information which is helpful.
I noticed that my original message is not displayed on my list. This seems
to happen on other messages.
Is there an explanation?
Blair

Are you accessing this newsgroup through the MS servers or through your
ISP's servers?

 

[Blair]

Are you accessing this newsgroup through the MS servers or through your
ISP's servers?

I am accessing through MS so the penny has dropped!
I wrongly assumed that MS site could only be obtained through MS. All the
others I use are through my ISP.
Thanks for the information.
Blair

 

[Blair]

Thanks for your help.
Do you make use of Secure Zone? I believe that if you do it gives you the
facility of breaking up the image into two
Do you know if you don't use SZ that it will do the same?
Blair

 

[Alex Nichol]

I am thinking of buying a Western Digital External 80GB 7200 RPM , 2MB cache
HD from Amazon for £87.76 which looks a reasonable buy.
I will be using it to backup my 4 Partitions with Acronis True Image on my
Dell Inspiron1100 laptop
My Laptop has a 27 GB HD but the whole system at present is about 5GB so I
think the 80 GB will be OK
Are there any snags or pointers which I should consider?

The one point to be sure of is that you can get at the drive to do a
restore should your main hard disk have nothing on it after a major
disaster.. I'm not sure what support Acronis needs for that. I use
Bootit NG and its related Image for Windows, which can access a USB
drive directly without support

 

[Edward W. Thompson]

With True Image you create a 'rescue' CD that is bootable and allows access
to the drive in the event of a non recoverable event. The CD will allow
access to either FAT or NTFS drives both fixed and external i.e. zip,
firewire or USB

 

[CS]

The one point to be sure of is that you can get at the drive to do a
restore should your main hard disk have nothing on it after a major
disaster.. I'm not sure what support Acronis needs for that. I use
Bootit NG and its related Image for Windows, which can access a USB
drive directly without support

So can Acronis True Image. True Image seems to work with more
external devices than BING. I have had problems using BING with my
notebook and an external Maxtor USB 2.0 hard drive. Although the
notebook supports USB 2.0 from its BIOS, it seems BING has difficulty
"seeing" the drive. Terabyte support worked with me for several days
trying to resolve the problem. No joy. I have not tried to use Image
for Windows.