Dedicated External Drive vs. Enclosure

Factual Questions
1

So, I’m looking at getting an external drive to back up all of my various accumulated junk to before reformatting my computer and getting it set up for my little brother (I’m joining the Air Force, and plan to build a new computer after I finish Basic).

Anyhow, the question I have is, what is better, a dedicated external HD, or an internal drive in an enclosure? I’m looking at performance, cost, and feasability of putting the whole thing in a box with some packing peanuts and various other computer hardware (such as a slide scanner and a SCSI card) and having my parents ship it to me after I get to Tech School (assuming that I’m correct in understanding that I’d be able to have my own computer while at Tech School, I should probably check with my recruiter on that count).

If I go with the external enclosure, can anyone recommend one that uses both SATA and IDE? I’ve got various old IDE hard drives lying around, and I figure that I can get a big SATA drive to back up my stuff to with the enclosure, then after I get my new computer, put the SATA drive in the new computer and stick an old IDE drive in the enclosure to act as backup for stuff like my pictures (as anyone who has had the misfortune of standing relatively still near me can attest, I take pictures all the time; I’ve got something like 2 gigabytes of scanned photos).

For what it’s worth, I saw some 500GB SATA drives over at NewEgg for about $150 each.

2

I’ve been buying external boxes and internal hard drives. Not long ago I ran across Western Digital Mybook drives - USB and Firewire, 500gig. I paid $250 CAD each for mine (which is a pretty good deal as most good Firewire boxes run around $60-70 alone). The WD boxes are really nice. They run cool and quiet and auto power on/off based on the signal it receives from the usb/firewire cable.

3

If you have tons of static data like pictures the most cost effective solution might actually be burning them to CD/DVD and getting a nice binder.

I am a big fan of the external USB encloseure/adapter arrangements, they can often be aquired for $30 or less and you can have as many drives sitting around as you want. As you already noticed, full size PC hard drives are fairly inexpensive compared to many of their dedicated external counterparts.

Something else to consider, monster drives tend to mean all of your eggs are in one basket. The more data you have, the less appealing that gets and the more difficult and time consuming it becomes to roll it over to CD/DVD.

I use an adapter/internal arrangement for backing up client machines to hard drives I carry for just that purpose, but this data is 30-100GB updated every few weeks and I would prefer to have a hard drive for each clients machines rather than burn off 10-15 DVDs every time I drop by. After a few months the HD’s become cheaper.