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external hard disk

gleneagles
Aspiring Legend
Posts: 11,105
Thanks: 2,459
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Registered: ‎02-08-2007

external hard disk

I am looking to buy a new external hard drive (500gb) and would welcome some advice before dishing out my hard earned cash.
I have spent hours looking at Amazon and various review web sites and when you find something that has a good review further searches throw up comments from some users saying don't buy.... drive failed after only a few months or known issues with certain drives.
So in short what would you buy and just as important where would you buy equally what would you not buy or where would you not buy from.
We are born into history and history is born into us.
8 REPLIES 8
HPsauce
Pro
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Registered: ‎02-02-2008

Re: external hard disk

What are you planning to use it for?
Santiago
Grafter
Posts: 3,291
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Registered: ‎10-08-2007

Re: external hard disk

I like buying from Ebuyer
They have a really good product review area and you can read about what customers think of the products after they have used them and rate them accordingly. For example
gleneagles
Aspiring Legend
Posts: 11,105
Thanks: 2,459
Fixes: 17
Registered: ‎02-08-2007

Re: external hard disk

I am looking to use it only for photographs(and a program that will sort out the photo albums)
We are born into history and history is born into us.
petlew
Pro
Posts: 7,416
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Registered: ‎30-08-2007

Re: external hard disk

I very occasionally use a LaCie external HDD, my one major complaint is that it is incredibly slow.
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artificer
Grafter
Posts: 1,850
Registered: ‎11-08-2007

Re: external hard disk

i got a nice iomega 500gb some time ago.  ide interface and a nice quiet drive.
paulh
Rising Star
Posts: 1,283
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Registered: ‎30-07-2007

Re: external hard disk

Got a Toshiba 320GB on offer from Maplin. Very nice, but XP struggles to stop the USB device too often and sometimes it hangs the lappy. Still can't work out why despite much googling. Problem doesn't seem restricted to the Tosh though .
godsell4
Rising Star
Posts: 3,366
Thanks: 15
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: external hard disk

Quote from: gleneagles
I am looking to use it only for photographs(and a program that will sort out the photo albums)

Before leaping into this purchase, check out info from:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/85/93/
and
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/forumdisplay.php?f=119
and
http://www.avforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=315
If you are looking at spending less than £150, you are looking at a device connected directly to your PC via USB/Firewire, for +£200 and skywards, you could get a NAS which would connect to your network. But consider putting a swicth (e.g. Netgear GS608) into your network connected to the two devices you wish to access those file quickly and frequently.
SW.
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samuria
Grafter
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Registered: ‎13-04-2007

Re: external hard disk

You can get cheap HD and they are cheap for a reason. For an external you need a high G shock number as its get battered about no matter how careful you are
A "G" is a colloquial unit of acceleration. Named after Gravity, which accelerates at about 9.8 m/s/s (metres per second per second, usually expressed as m/s^2 but I can't use superscript here). So 300 G is roughly 3000 m/s/s.
Say you drop a hard disk from a low desk 1 metre from the floor. When the disk reaches the floor it will be travelling at 9.8 m/s (I'll round that up to 10). The thing about the shock is that once it makes contact with the floor, it will decelerate very quickly. I'll take a couple of scenarios with figures taken from the top of my head. I'm also assuming that the disk falls on one of its faces, so it receives the full shock (deceleration) on immediate impact.
Consider it falls on carpet. The carpet will give the disk 5 mm (0.005 metres) in which to stop moving. Assuming a constant deceleration:
10 / 0.005 = 2000.
2000 m/s/s is two thirds of its rated shock, so in this case your disk is still OK.
Now consider it falls on concrete. I'm going to assume that the concrete will flex by one-fifth of a millimetre, 0.0002 metres. (I think that is probably an over-estimation of how much the concrete will flex, really.)
10 / 0.0002 = 50 000
The disk will hit the concrete at over 16 times the rated shock warranty.
So the the moral of the story here is that if in normal language, you consider the disk to have experienced physical "shock", it is probably over the 300 or 350 Gs mentioned on the label.