Need a good place to get an external hard drive

[NewJeffCT]

After our PC crashed a few weeks ago, I'm getting scared that I only have a limited amount of time before it goes permanently... so, I would like to get an external hard drive so I can copy files from the PC's hard drive to the external hard drive.

FYI - we have a 3 year old Dell desktop that runs Windows XP, probably the home edition.

Any suggestions? Anything I should know first? Are most of these things just plug it in & start downloading?

Thanks

[goddess40]

1. We're looking into do the same thing

I'd sure like to know the information too.


But Dell is about as right wing a company as you can find. I think all but maybe mac's are right wingers.

[NewJeffCT]

10. well, as both the Missus & I used Windows at work

We're going to stick with some sort of PC that can run Windows in the future... While it probably won't be Dell due to their RW connections, I'm not sure if any company is that much bluer... HP/Compaq? IBM?

[mcscajun]

2. BUSLink External HD

Easy to set up...

http://www.buslink.com/

[SHRED]

3. I shop here

http://www.newegg.com/app/manufact.asp?catalog=414&DEPA=0

Great service and super fast delivery.

[DukeBlue]

4. External hard drives

really suck. They are slow and expensive.

I would suggest opening the case and adding a second internal drive on the IDE bus. XP will pick it up and you can format it as a new volume. This only requires making sure both drives jumpers are set to "CS".

A google search on the topic will get you lots of good resources.

This is much faster than a usb connected drive. If you replace the machine you can then attach the hd to it and copy your stuff or leave it for extra space.

[Atman]

5. Bullshit.

I have an external 120 gb Firewire drive I "built" with a generic case and I don't even remember the brand of the actual HD...but it was a good deal, and the only time you even notice a speed problem is when the thing has gone to sleep and must spin back up to start readin/writing; sometimes -- sometimes -- that costs me 2-3 seconds. But I use it as Photoshop scratch disk and store my iTunes library on it, so it doesn't actually get a chance to spin down too often.

Maybe your you're using a USB 1 model?

[thecorster]

22. I concur

there's nothing inherently slower about an external HD compared to an internal. That's just crazy talk!

[Jackpine Radical]

6. I make my own.

Right now I have a 40Mb 2.5" laptop drive sitting in a little blue box & connected to my laptop via USB 2.0. The drive is from an old laptop I junked out & the case was about $20 on eBay. I also bought a 120Mb 3.5" drive for $50 at Best Buy & ordered a shock-resistant usb 2.0 case for it on eBay for about $25 including shipping, so the total cost will be about $75, about half what a store-bought external drive would cost. I use these external drives for backup & for storing jpegs, etc. They work great & USB 2 isn't all that slow.

It's actually not much of a trick to put one of these little hummers together, either. I manage, & I'm a 60 year-old certified technoklutz.

[Kolesar]

7. How do you get that hard drive to communicate on USB?

You refer to a USB 2.0 case. Does this case have electronics to "get" the hard drive onto USB?

[JohnyCanuck]

15. The IDE drive fits into the case and connects to

the standard 40 pin IDE type cable connection provided inside the back of the case. Within the case the IDE connection is electronically changed over to USB and the external plug on the back of the hard drive case is a USB type. You just plug in the USB cable between the case and your PC, turn the power on and you are in busines. It's also hot swappable so you don't have to reboot the PC to get it to recognize the external hard drive every time you disconnect or reconnect the USB connection.

The only thing to be aware of is if you have an older PC especially if you run Win98 you probably have a USB 1.0 connection which is a lot slower than the current USB Ver 2 standards. However you can buy USB 2 PCI cards to fit into a PCI expansion slot on your motherboard so you can still connect at the higer USB 2 speeds. If you are running Win 98 you will also have to install the USB 2 drivers from the diskette or CD that comes with the card.

To tell if you have USB 1 or 2 on your PC, go to device manager and look for the USB connections and look for the USB controller usually near the bottom of the list of devices. If you see the word "Enhanced" within the description you've got USB 2, without the word "Enhanced" in the controller description you've got the slower USB 1.

[Kolesar]

26. that was nicely written...thanks for the advice...eom

[ClassicDem]

11. Agree Make your own.

I make these for my clients all the time, really easy to assemble and it will save you some money.

You can save anywhere from $20 to $100 when you make your own. You can pickup the External Enclosure from Amazon, here is an example of one for a 3.5" drive for $24.99.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0006BGV2O/qid=1105983990/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-6840444-7414358?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846

Then just get any 3.5" Hard Drive I would recommend anything over 80 Gigs here is a 160GB drive from Amazon for $99.99. You can find cheaper but I am just showing you what you can get.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00008DSRF/qid=1105984157/sr=8-7/ref=pd_csp_7/104-6840444-7414358?v=glance&s=pc&n=507846

Total price on your drive is $124.98 compared to $140.59 for the Iomega drive of the same size.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002A9TJQ/qid=1105984425/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/104-6840444-7414358?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846

When making your own be sure to buy the 3.5" enclosure the 2.0" is cheaper and smaller but it requires a laptop hard dive which is about double the cost of a regular 3.5" PC hard drive.

Once the drive is assembled all you have to do is plug it into your Windows XP computer and it should be auto detected by Windows you can then format the drive and start using it.

[WillowTree]

8. Why bother...

....with an external? They cost more and take up space. I picked up an internal drive at a computer show (but you can find them just about anywhere.......just watch the ads) and it took about 10 minutes to install it. Makes back-ups a snap and it's just 'there' all the time.

[NewJeffCT]

9. We may get a new PC soon

And, I would like to be able to transfer all of our pictures & other important files easily from the old PC to the new one.

[WillowTree]

13. So...

....you just take the second hard drive out of the old PC and install it in the new one. I'll probably be replacing this machine in another year or so, too, and that's exactly what I'll do.

[david_vincent]

14. If you're going to buy a new PC, you should

definitely check out local places. We just bought a new machine and looked long & hard at all of the options. Ended up buying a locally made one.
Big problem I had with Dell was that you don't get a hard copy of the OS. They just tell you to image it yourself... which isn't an acceptable customer service policy as far as I'm concerned.
Comparing all of the cost vs. feature details, our locally built PC was flat out the best bang for the buck. We got a hard copy of the OS, three years ironclad warranty with free regular maintenance, quality components such as an MSI mainboard, and free copying of old files, folders, and emails included. Best of all, we helped support some people right here in our community. Total cost was $773.

[ClassicDem]

17. I would also recommend this.

I use this software all the time for my clients who get new PCs and wan't to transfer files and programs over. Easy to use and it comes with the usb cable if you do not have a network or hub already.

AlohaBob PC Relocator Ultra Control 2005

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002MPYIY/qid=1105985640/sr=8-2/ref=pd_ka_1/104-6840444-7414358?v=glance&s=software&n=507846

[callous taoboy]

12. I have been happy with my external hd-

I have a super fast "fire wire" connection to an 120 gig Acom Data external. There is no negligible difference between it and the internal. I use Norton Ghost to image my hd onto the external in case of crash. The nice thing about the external is portability. I'd like to buy a safe to keep it in since I have lots of family photos and e-mails stored on it.

[idiosyncratic]

16. Get a second internal hard drive instead.

Very easy and inexpensive fix. Here is a Maxtor 80 Gig hard drive for only $62.40.

Recently I put a second hard drive in my computer and installed Win2K on it. After partitioning that hard drive, I was able to transfer all the data from the original hard drive. That one is now used for music and photo files that get burned to CDs for safekeeping.

[NewJeffCT]

18. you have to install windows?

so, I actually have to go out & buy it if we lost the CDs that came with the computer when we moved?

[WillowTree]

19. No, you don't have to buy an OS...

....for your second hard drive if you're going to use it as a second hard drive regardless of whether it's internal or external. It will just show up on the tree just like your CD-ROM or other drives do. (IOW, my CD-ROM drive is drive 'd:' on the tree, the burner is drive 'e:', the secondary hard drive is drive 'f:' and the memory card reader on my printer is drive 'g:') You only need to install Windows on the secondary drive if you want, for whatever reason, to use a different version on it than you're using on the primary drive.

[idiosyncratic]

21. No. That was just how I upgraded from Windoze 98SE.

Your second hard drive will just show up in the "tree" as D, if the first hard drive is not partitioned.

You will have to format the drive at first and that gives you the opportunity to partition the drive which is a good thing to do with today's large hard drives.

[WillowTree]

20. I got an 80 gig...

Western Digital for about $50 with a rebate. Definitely the most economical and, in my opinion, the most efficient way to go.

[giant_robot]

23. I shop at tigerdirect.com for my hardware.

I reccommend them highly, FWIW.

[idiosyncratic]

24. You were lucky. I've had bad experiences with Tigerdirect

And my sister recently purchased a TV/monitor from them that didn't work at all.

[karlrschneider]

28. Woops, shoulda read the whole thread, you beat me to it!

I've been happy with them too...

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

25. There are other things you can do

if you suspect a hard drive failure may be on the way. I can take your hard drive and "image" it- that is, put all your information onto a second NEW hard drive so you can just swap it out and continue on.

That way you don't have to worry about external drives (USB external drives ARE slow, but only because the USB bus has limited bandwidth- Firewire is a LOT faster, but you have to install a firewire card into your computer if it's not built in, and they still ain't cheap).

Anolther thing you can do is get a DVD burner (the prices are going down FAST) and burn your important file backup to a DVD. They have a data capacity of 4.7gb, which is usually more than enough for your "My Documents" folder, or you can use a dual-layer DVD which at this time costs about ten bucks per disk, but the data capacity is almost 9gb.

One of the few main reasons a hard drive might crash after only 3 years would be if it were an inferior brand such as Western Digital- they suck, and I've seen many of them die prematurely. Maxtor, Quantum (sold to Maxtor), Seagate, IBM (now Hitachi) are much more reliable.

http://home.comcast.net/~pchomerepairguy/services.htm

(Note: when I image a hard drive, I also do a virus scan, and I delete all 'temp' files for you.)

[NewJeffCT]

29. I don't know if it's a hard drive crash...

I don't know if the hard drive is breaking down or there are other problems. The advice I got on here a few weeks ago when I first encountered the problem - blue screen, trouble rebooting, the following error message: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmd_stp_ottj.asp

and, when I finally got into the PC, I had to use the screen name we didn't normally use to actually get to the desktop, and all of our file settings were lost - i.e., SBC DSL was no longer the default internet access, it was back to our old AOL default - and, we had to go into C:\Documents & Settings\ to get at the old files.

Unfortunately, when we moved a few months ago, I think we lost the Windows CDs that came with the PC.

[NewJeffCT]

30. Also

I don't know if just changing hard drives is what we want to do - I'd almost prefer to get a new PC once we have all our personal files safe. When we get the Dell Dimension desktop 3 years ago, it was just the basic model, and other than the clock falling behind 5-10 minutes every week since we bought it, it's been fine... though, it never seems to be able to complete a Disk Cleanup.

But, now we have an almost 2 year old daughter and have more call for things like video editing than we did in the past (we have a mini DVD camcorder & a digital camera)

[karlrschneider]

27. I buy tons of computer gear from

http://www.tigerdirect.com

Don't know anything about their politics but they sell good stuff at very reasonable prices. I got a 60 GB Kanguru USB drive not long ago, it works just fine and if it's any slower than my IDE I can't tell it.