I am going to buy an external hard-drive

Yes, I have decided to buy an external hard-drive - I am going to get a 500GB one - I want it purely for storage and back-up - which is why I want an external one that I can just wack into a USB port on any computer and commence Larging.

Anyone have any comments about external hard-drives? Any issues I should know about?

I'm interested to know if these things are really fast enough to use as a spare games drive - ie is USB2 data transfer speeds okay - and I am talking about has anyone actually tried it?

This one has got me excited - I saw it in PC World:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/740726

I want to buy this tomorrow. I've already read all the reviews about the external casing being flimsy - but it seems the internal Western Digital drive is a very nice little number.

I've found specs on it which seem pretty good to me - but have yet to find out what size cache it has - I am wondering if this is a drawback of external drives - I'm hoping it isn't like a 2MB cache or something small:

Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)

Seek Times
Read Seek Time 8.9 ms
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)

Serial Transfer Rate
USB 2.0
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 480 Mbits/s (Max)

It has a 16mb cache. CCL have it for pretty much the same price.

They also have a LaCie one for about £120.

Ah, I found it termed as 'buffer size' - it is 8 MB, I'd rather have 16MB, but 8MB is not too bad - considering it is mainly for storing my rather large collection.

"GfK" - I think the higher versions of the 'My Book' have 16MB - mine is the entry level one.

puki - I have heard of a few problems with the buttons malfunctioning on that drive you have pictured. I would do a bit of netsearch to see if it really is an issue.

Wait a minute - I found other places saying it has 16MB.

Oooh, I can't lose here. 8MB is okay, 16MB is Larger.

I do find it odd that Western Digital don't put the buffer size in the specs.

The fact that various sources on the internet quote different sizes makes me wonder if it is pot-luck what drive you get inside the black box - they probably just encase left-overs in those black boxes - probably all refurbished stuff.

Buffer size is irrelevant then.

Ah, but my other question was are these things okay for gaming.

If you're looking for a high capacity backup device, external USB is the way to go, due to its convenience and the fact you can separate it from the main machine to prevent a virus jumping onto it. I'm sure USB2 transfer rate is good enough for gaming, but you are paying a premium. I'd only get one for games if your motherboard / case can't take any more hard disks.

If you're looking for high performance games hard disk, go for a WD Raptor 150GB or two standard drives in RAID-0.

(I now have 2 Samsung 7200RPM drives in RAID-0 and they are just slightly faster than my previous 10000RPM WD Raptor)

To be honest you won't notice much difference, despite all the tech talk and fanboy-ism.

I just picked up the entry level (USB only) 250gb version of that drive. I had a gift-card for Best Buy and they had it on a pretty decent sale so I figured I might as well grab it seeing as I've needed a backup drive for a while.

No problems yet. The only drawback is that it's formatted FAT32, but a quick reformat and I was ready to roll.

Haven't attempted, and don't plan on using it for gaming though, so I can't help you there.

Yeh, I heard about the FAT32 thing with this drive. I will lesson it on sight.

I shall buy it tomorrow and then test it for gaming.

I have a USB2 external drive.

The speed tops out at about 24MB/sec for very large files, much slower when transferring many small files.

I have it's little portable bro, WD Passport 60Gb. Not a moment of trouble, which is exactly why I bought a WD in the first place.

Not sure you can expect intalled apps to know what they are doing if moved to other machines though, unless you got a way of fixing the registry which could otherwise be all out of whack, depending on any standards you may elect to lay down as a workaround for that bit.

I just bought a external hard drive enclosure for $14 and stuck the noisy old western digital HD in it. It's plenty fast for data storage and backups and didn't cost much. Meanwhile my new samsung HD in my old puter is almost silent.

I'd recommend just getting a good deal on a HD enclosure online and sticking any old regular 3.5" drive in there.



http://www.supermediastore.com/philips-spd-5300-3-5-inch-usb-enclosure-hard-drive-external-enclosure-black.html

Allthough I got mine for $20 including delivery.

I bought Lacie because it's a Porsche :)

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=65306#729006



Very good for backup purposes or moving big files but I hae not tried to use for gaming... I don't think that USB would be fast enough but that really depends much much the game uses HD.

Yeah, make sure to actually use it before that lightning storm hits. Or you'll remember the hard way like I did...:p

Yeah Puki,

The external 3.5 empty cases are about £25.00 so add in the cost of a drive to go inside and it may be cheaper to go that way. Plus you can put other drives in later.

IPete2.

Well, I've bought the WD My Book - but I went for the 320GB version. The reason being I was a bit suspicious of putting money into a 500GB one if it was a load of bent.

Anyway, my initial reaction to this drive is it is slow. Obviously, the drive itself will probably be quite tasty - it must be the transfer over USB2. I'm not sure though.


I knew that I would need to format it as it comes as FAT32. So I decided to copy the current drive contents (utility software, etc) to my internal HD - that seemed to take a long time.

Currently I am formatting the drive to NTFS - I started the format about 17 minutes ago - it is only about a quarter of the way done.

So, I'm looking at around an hour to format this 320GB drive. I'm not happy with that kind of speed.

EDIT:
Looks like it will be around 1 hour 20 mins+

EDIT:
It is 3 quarters done, so we are looking at more like 1 and a half hours just to format this rodent.

Mmm, I'm pondering whether this thing can be taken apart - I mean, I wonder if I could just remove the drive and stick it inside my PC?

You can:

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1030453380

...But I think it would have been cheaper to buy the bare HD instead of WD "My Book" :) External HDs are slow, but they are MOBILE - you're paying for this feature, not speed.

I may now just leave it alone.

I was a bit suspicious, so I moved the drive to one of my rear USB ports - I just used a front one as a quick install option.

I am suspicious of whether the front USB ports are USB2 - I think on some computers it is always safer to use a rear USB port. So, I have moved my keyboard to a front port and stuck this drive in at the rear.

Since doing this and obviously formatting to NTFS, the drive does seem quicker.

I'm going to carry on backing up data onto it - later I may try installing a game to it to see how well it runs.

USB2 isn't really fast enough to do extensive paging for somethimg like a modern game, it's MUCH slower than the internal HHD interface but fast enought to watch video's and do most things ok.