Buying External Harddrive: Advice please

Aceform

Hi, My hard drive crashed. I wanted to buy a new hard drive. But just wondering if anyone know If I went for
a larger (500 GB), will windows xp support this. I heard someone mentioning that it may not be.....

Also the hard drive spec (I have the pc brought from DELL, but don't remember the spec) says it is a 2.5 SATA hard drive. If I buy
3.5 SATA hard drive, will that work?

Any help/feeback will be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Ace

vir7ual

Windows will support 500gigs no problem.

Dell spec pc with 2.5" sata drive? is it a laptop you're after buying? Normally its a 3.5" drive in desktops unless dell are changing over which i cant see happening. 2.5" drives run slower than the 3.5" drives which suit them to the battery running of a laptop.

The Western Digital MyBook range is a nice external option, 250gig, 320gig, 500gig, 1TB. The drive can be noisy when its spins up but its not overly annoying. nice stable elegant design and cheap too. They do look well on the desk

Ruu_Old

2.5" hard drives are normally in laptops as mentioned, 3.5" is desktop PC hard drives.
Go for the Western Digital MyBook if you are going for external, it is USB2 so you don't have to open the PC if you don't want to, you can get them at Komplett.ie 500GB is €129.95 minus shipping. I have two of them (2x250GB) and they work very well, no problems with them.

Aceform

Many thanks for the speedy response. It is a desktop. I'll double check the spec.

Cheers

Aceform

Sorry, any ideas on an Internal Hard drive for desktop?

DirkVoodoo

Any reason for an external and not another internal SATA?

Unless you have an e-SATA connector, then your HDD will only transfer at USB speeds.

As mentioned the WD MyBook Essential is great. €150 or less from dabs/komplett for 500GB and they are whisper quiet. Bear in mind you need a spare power socket for them.

Aceform

Sorry Dirk, I was initially enquiring about an Internal SATA hard drive. Any ideas?

vir7ual

western digital make good internal 3.5" drives. As do samsung but ive never had problems with western digitals(touch wood). Again its down to size and what you want. if you're looking for 500gigs internal storage then windows wont have a problem seeing the drive. I didnt come across any issues anyways. Bear in mind when you power up the pc with the new drive in you wont see anything in "My Computer", you have to go to control panel, administrative tools, computer management, storage, disk management....here you'll see the new drive unformatted, you'll need to format it with an active partition.

Hope this helps

DirkVoodoo

Ahh, ok.

Well I think the WD Caviar range is a bit out of date, or was last time I checked, but they do have 16 MB cache and have been pretty reliable.

I have a Samsung Spinpoint and can vouch for its silence and general performance. If I could go back I would have bought two of these in 500GB guise instead of a Raptor.

In all honesty though, all HDDs are more or less the same, the technology is very mature and there isnt much competition in the industry, at least not until solid state drives take off.

Its pretty much a price per GB choice. From Komplett, for reference:

Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM € 115.01
Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 500GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM € 115.01
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM € 120.01
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA2 16MB 7200RPM € 115.01

dazftw

Those western digital external hard drives are a great bargain.. Im getting one! The 400GB version are €250 in pc world

vir7ual

could imagine the price of the 500gig on pc world :eek: wonder how much it costs to keep the store open but that price hike is enormous. Then again they do get people buying them, just goes to show what a name does.

dazftw

Yea its really crazy! Irish prices are too high!

jonny68

DeafVision wrote:

Yea its really crazy! Irish prices are too high!

your mad paying that money, check here instead.

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=318909

Ruu_Old

vir7ual wrote:

could imagine the price of the 500gig on pc world :eek: wonder how much it costs to keep the store open but that price hike is enormous. Then again they do get people buying them, just goes to show what a name does.

Actually, as much of a PC World hater I am, they had (maybe still do) a couple of good deals on external hard drives a few weeks ago.

Anti

As a ex employee of them, you should see how much money they make on everything bar pc's. There is only a 1/2% markus on them. And up to 80-90% on consumables.