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Portable hard drive

Mav
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Portable hard drive

Normally for external use I purchase a 3.5" internal drive and simply use an adaptor with power supply as I've never actually required portability.
I now want to buy a portable drive so that I can save my coursework on it (just about to start a degree course with OU - at my age I ask you ;)) and simply connect to the main PC at home or the laptop when away.
Been looking around and I think I may be better off with a host-powered drive. Obviously to save laptop battery I can easily transfer files to the laptop to work on and only use the drive when finished plus it would save trying to find two sockets or carry a two-way adaptor along with everything else - the laptop is a pretty powerful but heavy VAIO.
A small drive would do (250-500GB) keeping cost down. I have been looking at this one. The slower spin speed isn't an issue.
Does anyone have any suggestions about reliable drives? Am I making the best choice here?
I'd appreciate your comments and advice.
Cheers

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20 REPLIES 20
MrT
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Registered: ‎30-06-2010

Re: Portable hard drive

For a 500GB drive you may want to look at http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004KSRM0Y/ref=s9_wishx_gw_g147_ir01?ie=UTF8&coliid=I2CKETYE39U5W...
For £42 post free and twice the memory of the Samsung, it must be a firm contender.
ejs
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Re: Portable hard drive

The only thing with external hard disks from companies that don't make the hard disks themselves is that you won't know what brand of drive you'll get getting inside it. I will be avoiding Seagate drives in future - so that means avoiding third party manufacturers.
Oldjim
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Re: Portable hard drive

What is the problem with Seagate - I ask because I have always preferred their internal drives (I don't have an external one)
HairyMcbiker
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Re: Portable hard drive

Do you need 250+Gb or could you use a pen drive of 8 or 16Gb for less than £20? Last time I was an OU student (ok nearly 20 years ago) my course work was on floppies  Cheesy
w23
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Re: Portable hard drive

Or even 32GB for less than £20 (Delivered): http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=777_6&products_id=110632.
Going the other way (expensive), a SSD will be more robust than a mechanical hard drive for portable use (accidents can happen), this one comes with a handy portable enclosure: http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Solid+State+Drives/Kingston+128GB+SSDNow+V100+2.5%22+SATA-II+Sol... (other sizes / prices available of course) and low power consumption.
Call me 'w23'
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VileReynard
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Re: Portable hard drive

(Also doing an OU course)
The super cheap option is to get a free Gmail account and email your assignments etc to yourself.
The almost free option is to get a USB key for about £5.
Or how about a bit of free cloud storage - such as Dropbox, although that's not really intended for backups.
None require external power.
Of course, if you just want an excuse for an upgrade?
Personally, I backup to two different hard drives (one internal and one external) and use the email option for TMA's.
But that's overkill.  Grin

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."

ejs
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Re: Portable hard drive

Quote from: Oldjim
What is the problem with Seagate - I ask because I have always preferred their internal drives (I don't have an external one)

The most recent hard disk I bought is an Iomega 1.5 TB external drive. It contains a Seagate Barracuda LP 5900rpm drive. To be fair, I don't actually know if it's the iomega caddy or the seagate drive which is terrible, but I'll just avoid both of them in future. The drive likes to reallocate sectors and freeze up occasionally under access, requiring unplugging and plugging in again. It's probably iomega's fault really, on their forums they like to blame the power supply. Who supplied the power supply? Iomega.
anniesboy
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Re: Portable hard drive

This might be worth checking out,suggests 72p per gig .
http://is.gd/AWM37Z
hulls
Grafter
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Registered: ‎30-07-2007

Re: Portable hard drive

Or put in on Dropbox, and have it available wherever you are.
John
Ellis
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Registered: ‎04-02-2011

Re: Portable hard drive

I use a Freecom 2.5" ext HDD (150GB) and my free 5GB cloud space. The cloud is used for storage and synchronising files.
Mav
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Re: Portable hard drive

Thanks for all the replies.
Soon after going to bed I wondered about a pen drive. I'm sure that 32GB would be more than enough.
I could use the M$ SkyDrive account but internet access is a bit flakey in some areas so I'm concerned about reliability.
The buffalo drive looks good and by the time I've added postage to the Novatech it's only £4 more.
But a pen drive is more portable Undecided

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VileReynard
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Re: Portable hard drive

My OU directory of several years amounts to 1.8GB.
A 4GB drive is ample.

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Mav
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Re: Portable hard drive

Thanks Fox.
That's made the decision simpler...
I have a 2GB and 4GB pen drive both sitting idle so that's gonna save me a bit of dosh.
Cheers Smiley

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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear - Mark Twain
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Santiago
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Re: Portable hard drive

I got a WD Elements 320gb external drive, it is plug and play, works perfectly. You can get from from around £33.
linky