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External hard drives

Angel

Angel

Down with this sort of thing
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External hard drives

Boring I know, but if anyone can recommend an external hard drive for me I'd be grateful. I've found a couple which each add an extra 500GB to my poor and overloaded PC but to be honest I haven't a clue what I'm looking for.

My PC is a four/five year old DELL Dimension 2400, if that means squat to anyone, and it uses Windows XP.

I need an easy-to-use external hard drive with plenty of space on it to store some massive files.

So, er, yeah - any input much appreciated but no problem if not.

Thanks.
 
Re: External hard drives

the only thing you need to take into account here, except storage, is the time it takes for the drive to communixate with the rest of your computer! You dont want a drive that takes 20 seconds to send a .mp3 (yep, I have one of those slow-¤ss drives).

If you have Firewire support on your computer, use firewire instead of USB! Its faster!
 
Re: External hard drives

Does it matter what type of files I am transferring for storage? There will be no audio or video media involved - just images and text you would find in a book. Or does that not make the slightest bit of difference?

/no idea
 
Re: External hard drives

well i dont think so. although i am sure that it does take slightly longer to transport files to it as it is an external one. however i believe any external hard drive will do. try to get one with a usb cable. those should be relatively cheap. my computer teacher has one and i think it only cost her about 40 or 50 dollars
 
Re: External hard drives

The type of file doesn't matter, just the size of it :thumbsup:
 
Re: External hard drives

right. i bellieve that it wont let you store files that are bigger than 4GB.
 
Re: External hard drives

LACIE BIG DISK EXTREME+ 1.5 TERABYTE WITH TRIPLE INTERFACE USB 2.0, FIREWIRE 400, FIREWIRE 800 HARD DRIVE - 301200U
Click to expand...
And now for the price...

$479.99
Click to expand...
If you want an external hard drive with a lot of space, that's the way to go, but it is a bit expensive :hmm:
 
Re: External hard drives

1 and a half terabites..... Who needs that much?!?!
 
Re: External hard drives

I probably will too...mind you, $479 is about £245 so it is possible...the cheques I receive from the charity to buy stuff with are in £250 increments, so I could technically blow the lot on an external hard drive.

The size of the files vary, you see - a ten page story book TIFF (including colour images) is almost 2.5GB so imagine what a 500 page book with colour pictures would be. And at the moment I have almost 300 books to convert to TIFF and then transfer to a big enough hard drive. I'm starting to think maybe 1.5 terabytes may not be enough either...

Thanks for all the replies - it's helping :D
 
Re: External hard drives

Hi Sharon, your PC has USB 2.0 connectors so make sure the drive comes with this. What will happen to the data when you have stored it? You might need to think about backing it up if you want to keep it permenently, accidents happen and this sounds like a lot of work to lose.

An alternative might be a NAS drive assuming your PC is networked? More expensive but comes with RAID to protect against drive failure. All depends a bit.

Mark
 
Re: External hard drives

Western Digital - My Book Premium Edition II 2TB External USB 2.0/FireWire Dual-Drive Hard Drive
 Model: WDG2T20000N SKU: 8682295

USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 connectivity; built-in capacity gauge; up to 800 Mbps data transfer rate; dual-drive storage

$679.99

Western Digital - My Book World Edition II 2TB Remote Access Storage System
 Model: WDG2NC20000N SKU: 8488843

Ethernet connectivity; data transfer rate up to 1000 Mbps; dual drive storage

699.99


There is a couple more, they both have 2TB. :thumbsup:
 
Re: External hard drives

If it's just images and text files you're using it for, then 1TB of space would be rather unnecessary. You should be able to find a nice 100GB or even 40GB external hard drive at a pretty cheap and affordable price.

Which would range from about $30 - $90.
 
Re: External hard drives

The size of the files vary, you see - a ten page story book TIFF (including colour images) is almost 2.5GB
Click to expand...
Even though that is the smallest file size I have? I've got almost 300 books of varying lengths and if the smallest is almost 2.5GB, then surely if most of the other books are at least 100 pages long, I'll need more than 100GB?

I'm not good with numbers...so I'm probably very much mistaken...

I will be happy to do whatever weirdness I need to get my PC to cope with this stuff...I hadn't thought as far ahead as backing stuff up - is it just making another copy of the file? Probably wrong there, but that's what I always thought it was... I know about as much about computers as a turtle does about knitting. Or something.
 
Re: External hard drives

-_- so much for my advice...
 
Re: External hard drives

Have I made a mistake? Like I say, I struggle to recognise numbers so I may have added things up wrong...
 
Re: External hard drives

So I don't need anything bigger than 100GB?
 
Re: External hard drives

100Gb =
about 40 movies with good picture quality
1 million .jpg pictures
15000-25.000 songs (10.000, if you have 48 Khz sound, like me :) )
 
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