RR advice on External Harddrive

[audiobill]

Hey Ravewreckers,

I need your advice on buying an external harddrive. As many of you know, we are in the process of getting our lives back from the flood and the fun part of replacing items is now here.

I need to pick up a reliable very large external hd. We have replace our home pc with a laptop, but we now need storage.

Important features for us are:

1. quiet
2. easy backup/software
3. 1TB
4. fast

What would you suggest?

Thanks-a-ton,

Bill

[ForeverAutumn]

Hey Bill. I just bought a SimpleTech drive and it's very good. I am not a techie so I need something simple. This was total plug and play. All I need to do is touch one button and it will back up my entire HD. It is very quiet and very fast at 7200 RMP.

In my case, I want to transfer specific files from my PC to my Mac so I haven't used the feature of backing up my full drive yet. When I plugged the EHD into my PC it showed up as a new drive (I had three drives, C, D and G). All I had to do was drag the files from C to G and it copied them. Then I plugged the EHD into my Mac and dragged the files to my Mac HD. I was amazed at how easy it was.

The one that I purchased is 500GB and I paid $99 on sale at Best Buy. It came in a TB version but I didn't need something that big.

[Slosh]

I have Seagate and Western Digital. Never has a problem with any of 'em and the old ones are going on 7 years now. Just format in NTFS (unless you're on a Mac, I think).

I back up manually (mostly just my music and downloaded software installers).

[Mr MidFi]

One word of caution: don't rely too much on it. Some day, it WILL fail. Another word of advice...ALWAYS make sure to 'safely remove' or eject the device before disconnecting it from the USB port.

My wife lost irreplaceable files (including some stunning vacation photography) on a Maxtor removable 250 GB drive that was only about a year old. Not sure if they are any more or less reliable than other brands, but I'm pretty sure she was less than careful a couple of times while disconnecting the device. Live and learn.

(We still have thousands and thousands of pix in our archives, so don't cry for us.)

[Feanor]

Hey Ravewreckers,

I need your advice on buying an external harddrive. As many of you know, we are in the process of getting our lives back from the flood and the fun part of replacing items is now here.

I need to pick up a reliable very large external hd. We have replace our home pc with a laptop, but we now need storage.

Important features for us are:

1. quiet
2. easy backup/software
3. 1TB
4. fast

What would you suggest?

Thanks-a-ton,

Bill

I've had several external drives of different brands, (including raw drives I've put in separately purchased enclosures). The one I like best is a Seagate FreeAgent. Mine is only 250GB but I'd recommend a terabyte model. Here's the Seagate FreeAgent Pro 1TB External (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3930501&CatId=2429) at TigerDirect. I'm sure it meets all your criteria. It's "greener" than many in that it automatically shuts down after a period on inactivity. This model supports Firewire and eSATA as well as USB 2.0.

eSATA is the fastest but your laptop likely doesn't have a connector for that. What is more important is to get the drive on its own USB controller, not shared with other USB devices, (keyboard, mouse, flash drive, etc.). Sharing a controller can cause "dropouts" during playback which is very annoying. Avoiding sharing is tricky because its the hardware & OS that decide which controller to use -- just because your machine has 3 USB connectors outside doesn't mean it has 3 USB controllers inside. If you have a Firewire connector and If you are using other USB devices, you might want to connect the HD using Firewire.

My personal music collection resides on the Seagate I mentioned; it's permanently connected to an XP machine that is my dedicated music server. I'll have to upgrade soon because I'm running out of space: I almost certain to go with the terabyte model above.

[audiobill]

Well now that I'm armed with some RR expertise on harddrives, I'll be going with a 1TB Seagate of Western Digital hd.

Of course, ever the price conscious consumer, I'm going to wait for a sale, before I do this.

As usual, my raverecs buds don't lead me astray.

Next up,
How to retrieve my 62 gigs of music from my iPod onto my new laptop. My other harddrive was completely destroyed (130 gigs of music ouch!!!).

Thanks-a-ton,

Bill

[Javier]

Hi! i just bought a program so i can put back the music in the Ipod to your computer is called podmaxx ( $30.00) still havenīt used it, until is needed.( i already had lost 129g of music in the past and connected the ipod back bam! ipod went blank also).