Looking to buy an External Harddrive

My suggestion is to buy an internal hard drive and an enclosure; not both in the same package. That way you have options. I recommend firewire enclosures over USB if you can, because it's faster.

Also, you should go bigger than 50GB. You'll spend about $40-50 bucks on a hard drive that small, where for twice the price you can get a hard drive that's perhaps six times as large.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

If you have the port or not, I guess.


A lot of computers don't have one. For example, strangely, a 500MHz Pentium 3 PC of mine has one, but my new computer doesn't have one at all.

I have three external USB enclosures and they work fine. I don't really need firewire; it's not as if having a USB enclosure is undesirably slower. The speed difference is only apparent when copying several gigabytes of data. For storing files, an external enclosure is fine.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...asp?CatId=1204

Also, if I had to recommend a brand of drive, I'd go with Seagate. Maxtors are a lot cheaper, but also have a very short warranty and are more prone to failure outside of a year for that very reason. If I'm not mistaken, Seagates have a five year warranty; your drive will most likely be obsolete before it breaks.

There's nowhere I can't reach.