External Harddrive

[Penner]

Heyhey, so.. im on the lookout for an external hdd for my laptop and i thought i'd ask if anyone here had any good recommendations. ^_^

Preferably not "portable" ones (those without power-adapters) as i dont really lug my laptop around that much and they also tend to be more expensive.

[David75]

There isn't much to say about external drives.
Except the partitionning if you plan using it beetween macs and windows... and *nux/*nix flavors.
In the case you're only in macworld, or windows world, you don't even have to care.

If you plan plugging it to different types of system, then Fat32 partionning is mandatory for compatibility purposes. It might be a little more difficult for drives above 132GB to format though, but google helps.

Other than that, I tend to prefer portable ones, precisely because they do not need an external power adapter, they are tynier and a lot less noisy in most cases.

Also, usually you do not need that large a disk for an external application, because transfer rates are become slow comparatively to the amount of data to transfer if you use large disks. There's always the e-sata route, but it's not widespread enough yet.

If you do, you'd better consider a NAS, eventhough it's more expensive, you can do a lot more. Of course, this is not portable storage...


In the end, buy 2.5" disk, buy a cheap usb2.0 enclosure, do the mounting. Have fun and no pain with cables everywhere.

Other option is 3.5" harddrive, a green version will be enough (5400 rpm), a cheap usb2.0 enclosure.

[Inazuma]

Cooler master X Craft enclosure with a Seagate 3.5 disk

[Killa-Eyez]

Solid state drive (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive). Very expensive and not yet in big sizes but will last a lot longer..

Otherwise the above suggestions will do.

[David75]

Solid state drive (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive). Very expensive and not yet in big sizes but will last a lot longer..

Otherwise the above suggestions will do.

I'm sorry to contradict you, but SSD isn't really meant to be used as an external drive. That'd be a waste of money.
As for longevity, MLC SSDs and HDD might have a similar lifespan.

SLC ones, even more expensive than SLC would be the ones to have a much better lifetime, but they come in madly expensive prices for the storage space.

An SSD is meant for a system drive, and not any SSD, all Jmicron/Phison based are uber crap (eventhough expensive compared to HDD).
Then you have Indilinx based SSDs that are a leap from HDDs.
Then you have Intel at the top of MLC, and the uber drive in the X25-E range.
Please keep in mind Intel just had their postville drives out, a little more performance and "lower" price. That's for the X25-M range, the E range should follow.

Back the the question:
If data protection is very important, buy 2 external drives, have two copies for each important file, never connect both drive at the same time (electrically and to the comp).
Drives and enclosures from different manufacturers.
Most affordable, easy way to ensure some security to important data.

After that, it becomes very difficult to have the perfect, easy and affordable solution for data integrity

[Buffalobiian]

Other option is 3.5" harddrive, a green version will be enough (5400 rpm), a cheap usb2.0 enclosure.

If you're going for a 3.5" drive, I'd recommend a 5400rpm drive too. If you look for something like the Samsung F2 Eco range, their higher platter density offsets the lower spinning speed, so data transfer rates aren't any worse than older 7200rpm drives.

Especially if you're buying a cheap enclosure, 5400rpm will keep temps down, which translates to drive longevity. I've had external HDDs transferring data for more than an hour before, and those things get HOT.

After about year, and not much use, that drive has died. Twice.