I need some schooling on hard drives (let me try this one more time)

Drem

I had no idea this sub-forum had risen from the sea, so I actually created this topic in the old forum area, which is just for games now I guess. I was notified of the error of my ways and the thread was locked. So please allow me to try this one more time!


So, I want to buy a new hard drive. My laptop has 120GB in it, but it's sort of getting close to filled constantly! My budget is around $100. I can go a little above if I need to.

My first thought is to get an external hard drive. This is probably the most common route, as it makes sense. I can just connect it through my USB. The other day, I saw Newegg had this WesternDigital Elements 320GB external harddrive for somewhere between $90 - $100 (today, they didn't have that but did have a WD MyBook 320GB for$99). It was very tempting!

But then I thought about how some people have said it's more cost effective to buy a regular hard drive and put it into an external enclosure. That's an idea! I browsed Newegg and there was even a 500GB for under $100. Very nice! But the problem is that I have no idea how external enclosures work, and what restrictions there are, and why the hard drives all say OEM by them.

There are also the general questions (what are the best things to look for in hard drives, what I should and shouldn't use external hard drives for (can I install programs on them?), etc).

Any suggestions are appreciated!


Or I guess you guys can just talk about hard drives. There isn't a lot of tech discussion on them here, but I'm sure they have their own interesting qualities to them.

Silvoculous

Would you really need 500GB? If a 320GB external drive is all you need, and you can find one cheaply, you might as well get it. Those suckers go all the way up to 1TB now, easily, and they're often on sale for ridiculously cheap at big stores like Best Buy. Those guys are always having huge sales on hard drives.

Yeah, you can install programs on them, I run the entire PortableApps suite on my 10GB external drive (old) and for a time I also ran ePSXe so I could play FF7 on any computer I wanted. And of course I brought along the demos for Unreal Tournament and Halo for network games with random people.

Drem

Well, I figured that if I could find one with 200GB more space for just a tiny bit more price, it would be worth it in the long run. Someday the 320 will fill up and I'll have to spend a couple of days burning to DVDs. The same will happen with a 500GB, but it'll just take longer. Housekeeping a 1TB harddrive sounds like hell.

Right now, I was looking at some 320s; this WD one and this Seagate one. They seem pretty similar, so I guess the decision is really just based on which company is generally better quality. The customer reviews seem to lean towards Seagate, if only because one Seagate review says "don't buy that WD MyBook it is horrible and bad" and one WD MyBook review says "go buy that Seagate."

I chuckled a bit.

ArcSyn

Drem wrote: »

Well, I figured that if I could find one with 200GB more space for just a tiny bit more price, it would be worth it in the long run. Someday the 320 will fill up and I'll have to spend a couple of days burning to DVDs. The same will happen with a 500GB, but it'll just take longer. Housekeeping a 1TB harddrive sounds like hell.

Right now, I was looking at some 320s; this WD one and this Seagate one. They seem pretty similar, so I guess the decision is really just based on which company is generally better quality. The customer reviews seem to lean towards Seagate, if only because one Seagate review says "don't buy that WD MyBook it is horrible and bad" and one WD MyBook review says "go buy that Seagate."

I chuckled a bit.

I've had great success with WD, but Seagate makes awesome drives too.

Let me make this a little easier for you:
WD HDD : 1 year warranty
Seagate HDD : 5 year warranty