I assume not, but I’m thinking of buying one soon. What should I consider aside from the capacity?
Durability?
Speed?
What are some good external harddrives around 200GB?
Think about power requirement: do you want the device to be powered directly from the USB port or do you mind it requiring a wall wart?
As far as durability I have two 160GB hard drives, I can tell you what my experience with them has been:
Comstar drive
& Maxtor drive
The Maxtor drive has been excellent, no problems at all. The Comstar drive has caused problems right from the start, various errors. I only use it to back up my itunes library, Wouldn’t be good dor much more than that. I have had other Maxtor drives that I’ve been very pleased with, this was the first Comstar drive.
Please excuse the hijack, but…
The other day I called in an order for Chinese takeout, and when the woman asked my name, I was sorely tempted to reply HongKongFooey.
Generally when looking at consumer level drives you have three key performance indicators:
- Interface
- Rotational speed
- Cache size
Interface - you want USB so that’s sorted.
Rotational speed - generally 7200RPM is fine. 5400RPM is normally for laptops and 10,000 RPM is for higher end disks. If power isn’t a problem then I’d tend to go for the faster RPM.
Cache size: this is how much extra read-ahead is available. Newer models are arriving with 32MB cache. All other things being equal, these should be “faster”.
Longevity is always a dubious thing with disk drives - most manufacturers will provide a RTB warranty for a year or two.
tim
(Seems like this belongs in IMHO).
As trmatthe indicates, it’s unlikely you want anything other than USB. If the purpose is backup (surely the most common use of an external HDD) the last increment in speed probably doesn’t matter too much. A good approach is to upgrade to a new & fast internal HDD for your PC, moving the current one into an external enclosure for backup duty.
I just did some interface testing and demonstrated that USB is crap.
Of course, we all knew that, right?
FirWire 400 was almost twice as fast, and eSata up to 5.5x of USB 2.0 transfer speeds.
I used the same drive attached to three different interfaces.
I had a Western Digital external drive that I put together myself (bought the casing separate), and you had to plug it into the wall. It was a massive device that required its own box just to take it anywhere. The drive began failing 3 or 4 years later, which did not make me happy. But I’ve used Western Digital for years in all of my computers and they are wonderful drives, so maybe it was a fluke.
I recently bought a Simpletech drive from Best Buy, because I had a gift certificate and I needed to buy something. It’s very small and easily fits in my pocket. The great thing about it is it’s 100% USB, so I don’t have to mess with the wall power supply, but I have had problems with it not being compatible with some Windows Vista machines…I think there’s a USB port upgrade for that, or you have to plug the drive into a 2nd USB port (it comes with a splitter) to feed it more power.
You might want to get one that spins the disk down when not in use. Some of the cheaper enclosures and drives keep the disk spinning for the entire time the device is powered up, which shortens disk life.
I have lots and lots of external drives. The external Western Digital IDE-USB & SATA-USB 's I’ve used have not been all that reliable past their 2 & 3rd years. After various Western Digital flake outs & crashes I’ve been moving my data to Seagate Freeagent externals.
I have 2 Western Digital MyBook external drives, and I’ve had problems with the USB interface on both of them. Using firewire seems to resolve it (good thing I just got a new PC with firewire), but I cannot recommend these drives.
The external drives that are powered by the USB connection are the ones using a 2.5" notebook-size hard drive. The reason is, I believe, that a 2.5" drive can be powered only by the 5 volts on the USB bus. So you don’t need an external AC adapter as you do with external drives that use a 3.5" drive. But the 2.5" external drives cost more per gigabyte (and the 3.5" external drives are available in larger capacities). So you need to decide if the convenience (of not needing an AC adapter) is worth the added cost.
2.5 drives are all about portability and convenience as they are more expensive and slower. Also bear in mind that many (not all) newer 2.5 portable drives require 2 available USB ports to fully power the drive whereas older ones could get by with one USB port power.
Be careful here: you don’t just need 2 available USB ports, you need 2 available USB ports **on seperate hubs.
Unless you’re using an unpowered hub why would this be so? The second USB requirement is simply for power supplmentation. 2 USB ports on the notebook chassis will work fine as will 2 ports on a single powered hub.
That’s an obfuscation. Each USB hub can supply a maximum current. Sometimes you need more current than one USB hub can supply. So, if you plug both USB connectors into ports connected into ports connected to the same hub, the HDD may not work.
I think you’re confusing the notion of a bus powered vs a self powered hub which is the distinction I was trying to make. A self powered USB 2.0 4 port hub from a decent manufacturer typically has an approximately 2.2 - 2.5 +/- AMP DC power adapter feeding it. This is more than (via 2 ports on that powered hub) for virtually any 2.5 hard drive power requirements. If plugging a 2.5 drive directly into the chassis USB ports on a notebook or desktop unit you may exceed to the total power spec of the motherboard’s spec if other USB ports are driving heavy USB power loads, so you do need to be aware of total draws in that scenario.
What is the external hard drive going to be used for? The info posted above is great advice, but we need to know what you intend to do with it. There are hundreds of specific uses, but three general categories- moving stuff around between computers, providing extra space when you have no more internal capacity or want more convenient extra storage, and backing stuff up. You can use one drive for all, but there are compromises.
Personally, I have my prejudices from years of working on computers so I want to know what hard drive is in the enclosure, and I buy mine separately. I also typically do what Xema suggests, upgrading the main HDD in my computers and moving an older drive to an external case.
If the drive will be mostly sedentary, you want to back stuff up or provide more space for digital media, I’d suggest you buy the biggest 3.5" Seagate or Samsung drive that fits your budget and an external enclosure that meets your needs as far as aesthetics and connectivity go. Since you’re asking about a 200GB drive, I think this is you. The connection type is important. Get SATA if you are concerned about speed, future-proofing, etc. If you are just occasionally copying files over and you don’t intend to eventually put this drive in a new computer, you’re fine with IDE. The connection type on the HDD must match the enclosure.
If you would like to access the drive on more than one machine on your local network, consider a NAS (network-attached storage) enclosure. There are lots of good reviews on Newegg.com to get an idea of whether an enclosure is any good or not. If you have a Mac and you want to use firewire disk mode or you’re doing video, get a Firewire case with Oxford 911 chipset.
If the drive will be mostly portable, used to move around a music/photo/movie collection, etc. I’d suggest buying the largest 2.5" Seagate or Hitachi IDE drive that fits your budget and a solid Aluminum external enclosure that meets your needs as far as durability and connectivity go.
If you don’t want to buy a separate drive and enclosure, I would personally only buy a Seagate. Whatever you do don’t buy a cheapo external with a crappy generic drive and flimsy plastic case unless you’re only using it as a disposable device or you enjoy doing data recovery.
The file system can make a difference if specific situations apply. Most external hard drives now come preformatted NTFS. If you want to be able to back up or have big files (~4.5GB), such as backed up DVDs on a Windows machine, this is what you want. If the hard drive has to be compatible with read write access between PCs and Macs, such as an iTunes music library, FAT32 is better. Obviously if you are using it to back up a Mac, you want to reformat with a Mac HFS filesystem.
There are lots of good threads on the Dope about backing up computers and files, so I won’t repeat that here.
Not only that, but customer reviews on computer hardware sites like NewEgg show a rather troubling number of failures for these drives in the first few months after the warranty expires. Western Digital were, for quite a while, considered to be near the top in hard drive quality, but their external drives have, over the past year or so, been gaining something of a reputation for poor reliability.
I’d definitely consider Stan Doubt’s recommendation of a Seagate internal drive with an external enclosure. The three new drives i’ve purchased over the past few years have all been Seagate SATA drives, and every one of them is still going strong. Not only that, but if one does die, with Seagate you have a five year warranty, unlike the 1-2 years offered by most drive manufacturers.
Of course, in the event of hard drive failure, a good warranty might not completely make up for the loss of your data, but getting a new drive free is better than having to pay for one.
My external backup drive is a Seagate SATA drive in a Rosewill enclosure. The enclosure was about $25 from NewEgg, it has its own internal fan, and has work perfectly so far.
I’d also recommend an enclosure. Even better is one that suports RAID 1 (mirror dirves) for best data security. They tend ot cost about $150 to $300. Drives themselves are cheap though. I have one from DLink that connects to my network and has two 500 gig hardrives on RAID 1.
Get the smallest form factor you can find and either one you can connect to your network (gigabit would be best) or directly to a PC through eSATA if possible, or firewire if not.