Tips on Hard Drive Care?
 

I'm sure some of you will laugh at this question, but I just bought this external hard drive ( Newegg.com - Western Digital My Book Essential WDG1U2500N 250GB 7200 RPM USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - Retail ) and am wondering if it is okay to lay it down on its side while I'm using it.

Also, do you guys have any tips on how to preserve the life of the external hard drive?

There are some small things to do, such as not starting and stopping it repeatedly, keep it in reasonable temperatures, and not doing anything that would obviously cause damage (i.e. dropping it, etc).

I would not put it on it's side because that might risk a chance of data loss, but I may be wrong on this one.

I've really never heard of a hard drive being sideways causing any sort of damage. I've been running a spare harddrive in my CPU for about 2-3 years now with no problems, and it is suspended sideways. Also, my harddrive enclosure kit is positioned sideways, and it is a 400gig that I've had for about 2 years now and I've had no problems. But I have heard about what mortis mentioned; reducing the turning on and turning off of the harddrive. Booting a harddrive is much harder on it than it continuously running from what I've heard. You can also get programs that check the health of your harddrive, which is always a good thing so that you can check up on it, and see if there's any areas you need to do better in (such as temp).

What programs have you used to check the health of your hard drive? And I guess I'll try putting the external on its side as it allows the bottom vent to actually have air flow.

Hard drives don't seem to care one bit about being run in any orientation. Personally, I don't know if I'd run one on a slant, but anything that's either parallel or perpendicular to the ground should be fine.

For the record, my current system holds its drives flat, facing up, but I had a Dell that held its hard drive vertically against its front panel, and it still works fine after six years of service.

Out of curiosity, how is the transfer speed on that HD.

Because I bought one the other day, and it is slow as shit, compared to my Premium Edition, which runs on Firewire. I don't even know if my USB2 is running at its potential or not.

USB 2.0 shouldn't be that slow. My Maxtor Onetouch III runs with USB 2.0 and the speed is very acceptable on it (I know it ain't the same HD but it shouldn't be any difference). Of course it's not as good as a firewire connection, but I have never felt the need for anything faster. Are you definitely sure you aren't running it on USB1? Because that is definitely slow as shit.

I have a question. I just bought an external one. Will I be able to watch videos right from the HDD using USB2.0? Can I install an OS on my drive?

Thanks.

I've checked my hardware listing in Windows numerous times, and it's clear that I have USB2 since one of the entries is labelled as "enhanced"...but obviously it isn't working, unless only certain USB ports on my system are 2.0...which would be absurd and stupid. I could care less at this point, since a firewire card is only like, $20, and performs very well.

And yes, an external HDD performs in the same manner as your regular old HDs...but some of them have to spin up if you don't use them for a couple of minutes or so, which can become annoying.

@Megalith Prime

I'm getting speeds around 11mb/sec, though if I'm running other programs in the background, the drive will slow down.

I have both a firewire and a USB2 version as well. The USB2 version is much slower than my premium drive as well. It's fine for me though since I just use it as long term mass storage device.

I watch VC-1 encoded 1080p movies off of my USB2 drive without issue. As long as you are not trying to watch a HD movie with an uncompressed audio stream it should be fine.

Anyone know any good programs to check hard drive health?

All hard drive manufacturers offer a diagnostic program/tool. You are better off using the one that matches your drive as these programs allow for a much safer low level testing without the fear of data loss on the drive. They tend to be far more accurate too than generic drive testing software. Fortunately Western Digital has an especially rich software suite for this sort of thing with their Data Lifeguard software.

If only one of them is listed as enhanced, I think that actually means you only have one USB2 port. Can anyone else verify?

Dhsu, if it reads Enhanced, it means the controller built into the southbridge is USB2.0 compliant, ergo any port that is connected to the controller will be USB2.0. Since it's very unlikely for motherboard manufacturers to include a separate USB2.0 controller, you can assume that as long as the word "Enhanced" is present all your ports are USB2.0.

Megalith Prime, define "slow as shit". Transfer rates depend on the USB to IDE bridge used in the enclosure. High quality IC also cost more, so don't expect a cheap enclosure to perform as well as more expensive counterparts. (But more expensive doesn't always necessarily mean better chips.)

The orientation of the hard drive does not matter and this came from Seagate themselves. Hang it upside down or at 37 degrees, the disk doesn't care. You mustn't however attempt to change the orientation while it's seeking (or powered on in general), as you can crash the drive heads quite easily. 3.5" desktop drives aren't designed for this.