Well, I was talking about the purely external type drive, not the enclosure type solution which I assume would be cheaper even at Best Buy.
I really the enclosure idea, since it sounds easy to swap multiple drives with it. Some questions:
Does it get all its power from the USB, or does it need an additional wall plug?
How “hot” pluggable is the drive inside the enclosure? Do you need to unplug the USB before swapping drives, if you have multiple drives for use with the enclosure?
Thanks!
Mine’s entirely powered by a wall-wart as not all USB ports and not all Firewire ports can source enough juice to run a full-size drive.
It is not an easy way of swapping drives - most enclosures are meant to be semi-permanent as you’d have to unscrew the enclosure, pull out the drive (mine cradles the drive in rubber blocks, rather than screwing the drive to the enclosure) and unplugging the data and power lines. The drive itself is definitely not hot-swappable, nor easily swapped.
Actually, an external drive isn’t truly hot-swappable. At best, it would be a warm-swap as you must, must, MUST stop the drive first. In Windows, it’s done with the Unplug or Eject Hardware icon in the system tray, and on a Mac, you dismount it by dragging it to the trash. Failure to do this is a sure-fire way to corrupt data.
“I really the enclosure idea, since it sounds easy to swap multiple drives with it.” Were you thinking of the scheme where you mount a drive into a carrier and plug that into a special drive bay in the PC itself? These have pretty much died away as they cost a good bit more than an external. One big advantage, however, is they’re moving data on the internal IDE or SATA bus, rather than USB/Firewire. Still needs to be stopped/dismounted before removal, though.
No, I actually meant using the enclosure, I was hoping it was easier to swap the disks out of it that it appears to be. Thanks for the info!
Well, I don’t really need to think. Bestbuy.ca sells a 200 gig Maxtor HD for $229.99. Canada computers sell the same drive for $148.
In the US, Bestbuy sells the same drive for $149.99. Newegg = $105.
You HD for instance at Newegg is $258.50. Bestbuy: $349.99. You might have gotten a mis-priced HD or it’s not the same external drive (I just did a quick search).
Best Buy often offers products on sale or with rebates, which can give very good prices. That’s how I buy most of the stuff I buy there.
My old backup drive that used to live in a 5.25" removable tray now lives in a USB box with external power supply. To make a copy of the HDD, I connect the USB box, the machine recognizes F:\ as a mass storage device, and I open Acronis True Image to make my archival backup. You could use it for anything else, but that’s my application.
My boyfriend uses one of those external USB enclosures for an extra hard drive, and he loves it. If your computer is compatible with them (I don’t know why it wouldn’t be), you have the added advantage of being able to take the hard drive out and put it in a desktop at a later date, or replace it but reuse the enclosure if it craps out. His enclosure can also be used with an optical drive instead. The particular style he ordered came in two sizes. Interchangable and reusable parts are good.
My computer has four hard drives in it, an Hitachi, a Western Digital, a Maxtor and a Seagate. I’ve had hardware issues with a previous Maxtor, but it seems like once they make it past a year or two old they are much less likely to crap out on you. I have a little 15GB Maxtor drive that’s the only remaining part from an oldass HP Pavillion. It’s not in a computer at the moment, but it’s still alive and kicking. The Hitachi has been going on strong for quite some time now, and I’ve heard nothing but good stuff about Seagate, and most Seagate drives come with a 5 year warranty. You just mail them the dead drive and they’ll send a new one.
Newegg is good… they are the only place I get computer parts from anymore. Really good prices and the shipping is super-fast.
Happy LaCie owner here. I use one of these without any problems. I’m rather picky about external drives, since I’ve gotten too used to quiet computing to put up with a noisy fan; the LaCie is fanless, which suits me fine.
We use LaCies at work. They work like a charm.
I’ve got one but it is firewire. Works like a charm.
I have two computers and 8 drives. 4 hard drives are configured for different uses; music, video, gaming and a general workstation (what I’m using now). They all have different operating systems and different configuations.
I’ve combined the external box with removable hard drive bays so I can easily exchange different drives into the removable box.
I have 4 back up drives (formatted but no OS) full of different stuff. When I need to access something I pop it in the external box, power it up, access data. when I’m done I power off the box and put the drive away.
My main computer hard drives are mounted in the same drive bays. If I need to access files on the music drive but I’m currently booted into the video drive I can pop the music drive into the external bay and fire it up.
Works great.
I’ve been thinking of getting a switch box for the firewire box so I don’t have to swap cables between the computers, but the price of firewire boxes have come down a lot (the one I linked to above is only 40 bucks - I paid $100 for mine 2 years ago) so I think I’ll just get another firewire box.
I like the idea of not running my back up drives all the time. One drive is 3 years old but I happen to guess it has only had power on it for 24-48 hours max. In theory, that drive should be usable for years and years to come.
<b>Xema</b> covered this slightly… is it worth it to buy a HD offline and put it in an external case?
I plan on doing it that way because I want to wirelessly stream video and music from it. Is there a reliable and effective USB wireless plugin that would work well with this?
In theory, AFAIK, this would also be true of any purely back-up drives inside a system. The hard disk is only spinning when you’re actually accessing the data, so the only disk in constant use is whichever ones are running the OS. Even though it’s plugged in to the power supply it’s not necessarily pulling power, otherwise I don’t think my system would boot up at all (I only have a 350w PS).
At least, that’s what I was told when I asked. I know when I access my back-up drives, I can hear them start spinning (one is considerably louder than the others.)
When buying an enclosure and a hd, what factors does one need to be careful about to make sure they work together? I see “IDE” and “ATA” used in the descriptions, does one need to be careful about what supports what?
I’m more a software guy than a hardware guy, so this stuff is pretty new to me.
The older connection (wide ribbon cable) internal drives can be referred to as IDE, EIDE, or more recently PATA (parallel ATA). They’re not techincally identical (EIDE is a superset of IDE) but in practice they’re used interchangably by hardware vendors.
SATA is serial ATA, which uses a much narrower cable & is not forward or backward compatible with PATA. Adapters to attach mismatched drives/controllers exist but it’s cheaper to just buy a PCI card with the appopriate connector if (for example) you want a SATA drive but only have PATA on your motherboard.
Generally the enclosure will be for either IDE/PATA or SATA drives, and connect to the computer with USB and/or Firewire (other interfaces exist, but if you’re not a hardware person you’ll rarely come across them).
The important thing is to match the drive type and the connection between the enclosure and the computer. IDE/PATA drives and Firewire connections seem to have the best price/performance ratio.
That’s not strictly true. Even when the disk isn’t spinning, the electronics within the drive still draw power.
Thanks Cynical Optimist!
FWIW, I’ve been using several large (250G) external USB drives as backup devices at home and at work now for a few months and have yet to run into any problems. All of these are just ordinary “internal” 3.5" drives in external USB2/FireWire enclosures. I use them in USB2 mode and they’re not any slower than a drive connected directly to the IDE bus inside the PC. The drives I’ve used have been Maxtor or Western Digital.
I will say this, though - heat is the #1 factor in the death of electronics, and these drives run hot inside those enclosures. I’ve swapped drives out of the enclosures immediately after powering them down and often they’re too hot to handle comfortably. So if anything, I think that might be a potential source of trouble. Some enclosures might be better at dissipating heat than others, but I have yet to find one that doesn’t run obscenely hot. But I haven’t really looked for such a thing, either.