USB Drives

[Evil Tony]

I was thinking of getting like a 250 gig USB Drive....are they like like flash drives, but bigger? Do they have the same makeup as an IDE Drive (with the platters) or it's just a chip in there?

[WalkinTarget]

Any external hard drive is simply an internal drive enclosed in a custom box. I bought a bare hard drive enclosure for $20 and added a spare 120gb drive to mine, so essentially they are all alike.
The one downside to them is usually their backup software, as it is not as easy as it could be, but they are getting better. Even the 'one click' backup routines require you to tell it what you deem as 'important', and even then most users won't save all of their essential to the external drive.

Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird user ?? Where are your profiles stored ?
Outllok user ?? Where does it store that data ?

A few examples showing that a basic user isn't qualified to find where the stuff that they really need backed up is located. My Documents isn't going to save everything you need. It'll be interesting to see the responses to see if a general consensus emerges on backup utilities.

[Evil Tony]

Any external hard drive is simply an internal drive enclosed in a custom box. I bought a bare hard drive enclosure for $20 and added a spare 120gb drive to mine, so essentially they are all alike.
The one downside to them is usually their backup software, as it is not as easy as it could be, but they are getting better. Even the 'one click' backup routines require you to tell it what you deem as 'important', and even then most users won't save all of their essential to the external drive.

Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird user ?? Where are your profiles stored ?
Outllok user ?? Where does it store that data ?

A few examples showing that a basic user isn't qualified to find where the stuff that they really need backed up is located. My Documents isn't going to save everything you need. It'll be interesting to see the responses to see if a general consensus emerges on backup utilities.

I would like to get it, due to mainly it being so portable.

[-IRC-MIKE]

I bought one for my shop a few years ago. It was for laptop drives so that I could pop the laptop hard drive into it so that I could back up the data before reinstalling. The one I bought is pretty nice. You can get them without the drive in them for very cheap, and then add the hard drive of your choice.

[WalkinTarget]

Any drive with even a measly 40gb capacity will be sufficient for most users, but what I prefer is a full system backup onto an external drive, so thats why I'm skipping the external HD solution and going straight for a Home Server, specifically an HP MediaServer 470 model.

Full backups of every rig on your network, 500gb of shared storage, remote audio playback, iTunes streaming and it also can host your website as well.

[juneau]

I was looking into a external drive for my new media PC. Hearing some not so good reviews spread across all manufacturers.

Deciding to go with another internal drive instead.

Don't let this put you off though.

[Dead...Again]

I bought a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 500GB yesterday. The drive itself seems pretty nice. I am using the FireWire interface; I already have a ton of stuff plugged into USB, and the FireWire device on my mobo wasn't being used.

I think the backup software that comes with it sucks. It allows custom backups where you pick which folders to backup, but it only displays certain folders. For example, I wanted to back up my COD4 player data, but the software doesn't display the Program Files(x86) directory. It does show the Program Files directory, though. Makes no sense to me. I am tempted to just going back to the free software I was using before (Everyday Auto Backup I think it is caused). It is pretty simple to use, but doesn't play well with UAC. Does anyone know of any other free backup software that's worth a crap?

I originally wanted to get a Seagate FreeAgent Pro, but I got a better deal on the OneTouch. I wonder now if I made the wrong choice.

[Zantheus]

I was looking into a external drive for my new media PC. Hearing some not so good reviews spread across all manufacturers.

Deciding to go with another internal drive instead.

Don't let this put you off though.

Have you thought about making ur own External?? Buy the HDD and buy the case seperatly

[DougBob]

Basically to add to what everyone has answered so far Tony. The externals are in 2 flavors, the 2.5" 5400 RPM mini, portable, etc. and the 3.5" full size 7200 RPM regular internal drives in a external case.
I have purchased 4 so far (2 mini 2.5" and 2 full size) and the ones I like best are the portables.
Here's what I have
1 x 2.5" 250GB 5400 RPM WD Passport
1 x 2.5" 160GB 5400 RPM Maxtor One Touch III mini
1 x 3.5" 320GB 7200 RPM Maxtor
1 x 3.5" 1TB 7200 RPM Hitachi

I have used the portable drives while on trips for ghost imaging my laptop and running VPC machine images. Both drives have performed beautifully to be 5400 RPM drives. I have ran 2 domain controllers, 1 exchange 2000 server and a XP pro client in VPC 2007 all at the same time from the 160GB Maxtor.
I have not tasked out the WD Passport drive that much yet, but I'm sure it'll perform just as well.
The only warning I will give is concerning the Hitachi 1TB drive. I have experienced some strange issues with this drive on my XP pro machine I have not had with the other drives. I contacted Hitachi tech support and they gave the usual CYA answer. Just a quick summary of the issue is a repeated disconnect and reconnect of the drive every few minutes if the drive is idle. I have not had the drive disconnect in the middle of any work, but I'm not saying I don't think it would. The Hitachi tech support said there must be some software that keeps probing the USB bus causing the drive to disconnect and reconnect. Well if that was true and it wasn't something specific to the drive my 320GB Maxtor would keep disconnecting and reconnecting also since I keep both the drives connected to the same XP pro workstation.
I just wanted to share that information.
Well that's about it man, I'll stop yacking for now. Hope this helps.

Cheers
Doug