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The Chatterbox => Computing => Topic started by: dinnerroll on December 30, 2007, 01:23:33 PM
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I'm in the market for a new hard drive, preferably an external because there's no more room inside my computer. I'm looking for somewhere in the 500GB range, and I found some on Newegg for around $130-$150. The thing I'm worried about is that a lot of reviews for external hard drives, on just about all of them, say that they crap out really soon. It's like, one review will say they've had it since 1834 and they threw it from a plane into the Hiroshima a-bombing and they went home to find it sparkling on their front lawn as good as new. The next will say they plugged it in and the case fell apart and left a steaming pile of shit on the desk.
So I need help finding a high-capacity, relatively cheap, operationally reliable, external hard drive.
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I ended up getting an enclosure and putting an internal drive into it. The one that I picked is a Rosewill USB 2.0/eSATA enclosure. It's black, nicely styled, and has a fan; you should be able to find it on NewEgg. My Interwebz (or, perhaps, our router) is being a dyke right now; I'll get you a link if it stops being dumb.
I paired it up with a 750GB Hitachi SATA hard drive. That combination has been serving me very well. :) Unlike many enclosures, this Rosewill one doesn't feel cheap at all. Most of the ones I've dealt with feel like they're going to break if I tighten the screws too much. This one just has a very solid feel to it. The controller itself also works quite nicely under Windows, Linux, OS X, and FreeBSD (which was my main concern), so no worries if you want to run another OS. The kit also comes with a SATA->eSATA bracket. If you have an extra SATA port in your PC you can put the bracket in and hook it up. It won't be hot-pluggable, but if you hook it up that way the transfer rate will be much better than USB.
Edit: Forgot to mention. I think I paid about $25-30 for the enclosure. Not bad.
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Jesus, great price for the enclosure. That's a great sounding setup. You were talking about plugging it into the SATA connectors inside the case, right?
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Yeah, it has a bracket that adapts the internal SATA connector to an eSATA connector. Like I said, you can't hot swap it when you go that route, but it should be as fast as an internal SATA drive if you do that.
That said, it works great with simple USB 2.0. It's noticeably slower than SATA (obviously...) but it's still pretty good, speed-wise. It's more than fast enough to stream compressed HD video clips, for instance.
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I'm getting something like 7 megabytes a second off my 100 mbit line with my MyBook.. but that's because the 200 Mhz ARM processor in there kinda chokes on it during file transfers. It's still plenty for MP3 streaming and such, but apparently I'm not getting that sort of speed watching videos. They go good for a bit, then chop up and stuff.
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I heard putting a drive into an external enclosure takes down its life expectancy. Is there anything to that?
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I suppose that would be true if you banged it around. Enclosures are nothing more than standard IDE or SATA controllers; no different than connecting it internally, really.
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They just happen to have to connect through another system between the IDE/SATA in the enclosure.
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I have this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/detail/offer-listing/-/B0007R6CG2/new).
Got it ~2yrs or so ago, and it's served me quite well, no problems at all. Never had to reformat or clear it out. Its purpose is just a 'backup' drive, or where I keep my music library/torrents/COMPLETELY LEGITIMATELY USEDripped dvds etc. Has its own power supply, and runs to my pc via USB cable. Data transfer is fast enough, I can stream music and video to my 360 over my wireless network, so remote access is quality enough for me.
Just noting that I hadn't had a problem with this brand/company. Good luck!
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This is the one that I have: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173042 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173042)
...and the silver version of it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173043 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173043)