BleepingComputer.com: Need Advice On Buying A Good External Hardrive

I want to buy a good external hardrive and I assume ebay is the best place to buy unless you have better advice. I shouldnt need more than 500GB. I would like it to be small enough to fit in my brief case if possible. I dont know much about this stuff at all. I do work as a mortgage banker and it would be great to take this with me wherever I go and just plug my laptop into it. Also, is it possible when I get this to just make it my desktop or make it as easy as saving things on my desktop? Thanks in advance for your help. Here is a link to ebay items. My computer is using less that 50 GB's now so maybe I dont need that much. Your thoughts?

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?s...o%3D2&fgtp=

This post has been edited by chugg: 01 July 2008 - 10:46 AM

Hello chugg,

There are many places to purchase an external hard drive, you could even buy an internal and convert it to external. I wouldn't recommend using ebay as you don't know what state the disk is in to start with or anything about its history. For that reason it is usually best to go with an online retailer or an electronics shop/store.

http://www.ebuyer.com/
http://www.newegg.com/

Thanks for the advice. But I am actually looking for advice on what unit to actually buy since I am not computer savy.

Because you are going to be connecting this to a laptop I would suggest that you purchase a external drive that has it's own power supply, like this one at Newegg.

I wouldn't shop on ebay, from what I've seen you can better deals on new components from Newegg or Tiger Direct. If you have a problem with what your purchase from ebay it can quickly become a hassle. From personal experience I know that Newegg's customer support is one of the best, they RMAed my optical drive that was a month out of warranty!

I really like the Western Digital stuff so I will point you to this:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/...asp?DriveID=391

Maxtor One Touch Mini:
http://www.maxstore.com/product.asp?sku=3847588

On a personal note, I don't know what data you will be using this
drive for, but 500G seems like overkill.

I will only add that...hard drive prices are (IMO) very inexpensive now and to me it makes little sense to pay almost as much for a smaller drive...as you would pay for a large one.

When reflecting on the amount of hard space you want, you should remember that...many of us (at one time) thought that a 120GB hard drive was very large and would never be used to capacity. That all changed when users became adept at saving music files, video files, and system backups (all of which will result in accumulating a series of files considerably large).

Consider your habits now...and what they are likely to be in the future...and then decide whether it's wise to buy a smaller hard drive.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Ca...ame=Hard-Drives

FWIW: SATA drives will be faster than IDE drives in terms of accessing and moving data. This may or may not be significant for you.

I would never buy a hard drive on eBay, considering how cheap and available they are from reliable retailers (with a warranty).

Louis

This post has been edited by hamluis: 01 July 2008 - 07:21 PM

That is some great advice! Thats why I ask the experts : ) Very good point Hamluis. Thanks again guys!

Wow thats a great site thanks! I bought the

Western digital 250gb passport
.59 thick
3.13 with
Length 4.96
Order – p9917133

Then they had great prices in gps systems so I got the Garmin StreetPilot C550 GPS Navigation

Thanks guys for everything!

Ok now I cant figure out how to backup my whole computer with the and the instructions do not tell you. Does anyone know how I can do this?

These may prove useful.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/
http://www.disk-image.net/
http://www.drive-backup.com/home/personal/
http://www.symantec.com/norton/ghost

There is no free way to backup my whole computer on my new removable hard drive?

Windows Backup is free.Here's the how-to:
http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/xpbackup.htm

If you could provide a link to the drive you bought, it would be helpful.

Some external drives come with backup software for that drive, but many do not. Many users just use a 3d-party application (e.g., Acronis True Image) to actually do and access the backups.

As mentioned, XP has a backup program which works, but has some features missing that other backup solutions offer.

WindowsXP Tips, Installing NTBackup on XP Home - http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm

Using NTBackup in XP - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308422

Using XP Backup - http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:u1Ryg...+disk&hl=en

NB: XP's backup cannot be made directly to CD/DVD...must be made to hard drive first, then use program to burn to DVD/CD (if you go that route).

Louis

chugg, on Jul 11 2008, 10:05 PM, said:

If one of the hard drives is a Seagate they have a free tool in the download section of their support site. I think it's called Disk Wizard

This post has been edited by garmanma: 12 July 2008 - 10:27 AM

chugg posted it is a Western Digital Passport. Unfortunately that drive only comes
with WD Sync, and from the posts I've read it's not very good as it only allows
you to "sync" your data between for example your home and work computer.