Hi all, I'm considering purchasing an 80GB hard drive from New Egg. I've narrowed it down to to drives that are the same brand. I don't know much about external hard drives but these two have good reviews. They're the Western digitial Essential HD or the Western Digital Dual Option. They're within a few bucks of eachother. I like the hot swap of the essential, however the timed backup of the Dual Option is nice as well. Any pros/cons either way? Here's the link to the website. They're the first two products shown when you scroll down: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...14+1035307792+4027&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=414 I'd appreciate any input, thanks.
Well first, all USB drives are hot-swappable. I have NO idea why they list that as a "feature" of one and not the other. The "Essential" is just a hard drive in a box. If that's all you need, you could just buy a drive and a box and BYO. It looks like the "Dual Option" is about the same thing, it just comes with backup software. For $3 I'd go for the latter, the hardware looks to be about the same.
Just an idea, but you could buy an Enclosure and buy a seperate hard drive to put in it. All those in your list only have a 1 year warranty and I have seen them go out If you got a plain Seagate hard drive you could up your warranty to 5 years
Thanks for the replies, RaiderRodney, you have an interesting concept. I checked out the seagate internal HD's and you have a good point. Also, for the price there's a lot more storage capacity. Two questions. First, I assume that HD boxes are around and I just need to do a little searching, but what a bout power supplies, and hooking up the HD to a USB port?
Far as I know they all come with power cords and USB cables. Here are a couple to look at: HD Enclosures At Newegg zipzoomfly has some too but for some reason I can't get the search results link If you will be doing backups fairly often I would get a mid-priced one as opposed to the cheapies. If it will be just once in a while you could always get this. I have one and they are great for getting data off old drives, testing fans....heck you can even run CD/DVD drives with it, but no cooling fans or anything like that USB / IDE Adapter at Newegg Good luck and have fun thinking it all over
I bought a good enclosure (supports both USB 2.0 and Firewire) and used a spare HD I had from a previous upgrade and us it as an external backup drive. Love it.
If you want your external to be compatible with OS X, you need to make sure the enclosure has an Oxford chipset. Mine uses the 911 and works wonderfully. I bought a Hiro from Tigerdirect, and the thing is so well built I could literally stand on it. Highly recommended.
For anyone that doesn't have one of those USB/IDE thingies I talked about earlier...they are on sale this weekend on newegg with free shipping. I can't tell you how handy these are Newegg IDE/USB Adapter
Just a note... they've been "on sale" for months. And this looks to be the same widget with a different sticker on it for about $5 when you take shipping into acount. If you have a big order, the shipping will be less than the $5 listed, and be an even better deal.
There is no box it is just a cable. No box makes it kind of dicey moving it around without an enclosure protecting the hard drive. This cable is usually used for bench work moving or recovering data from hard drives. It is rated for all IDE drives from a desktop to a laptop size drive. I wish I would have had one a few months ago when a cheap internal cable smoked a drive I was trying to duplicate.
Well I checked Circuit City on line today and they had a Seagate 160GB external hard drive for $69.99 after rebates. Since that was twice the space I was looking for, I went ahead and bought it. I thought there was more to them, but they work just like a flash drive.
Ah ok, I see the item now. It doesn't have its own power supply though Which really makes testing fans and stuff a lot easier. And that was a good price on that ext drive you got
