Your experiences with external Hard Drives, how are they?

[Gray Fox]

Lets say I bought this drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136023
Would that work for every day use, or would the USB connection be to slow, would it only be useful for storage. What about if I bough a drive with a Firewire connection? Could I comfortably play games, and watch movies from it?

I currently have a 120 GB maxtor 7200 rpm ATA drive, how would that external usb 2 drive compare to what I have now performance wise.

I do not want to buy an internal drive because my PSU probably could not handle another one, although if drives are not that power hungry I might give it a shot, I do not have enough money to buy a good quality new PSU,and I do not want to trow the old drive away, thats 120 gigs that might have been used for quality entertainment.

 

[WhiteZero]

I have an external enclosure with an old 30gig in it. Havent had any problems yet.
Their great for storage, but I dunno if you'd want to play games off it, at least not any games made in the past 5 years.

 

[Operational]

I bought an external hard drive enclosure and put a 120GB drive in there. It's been great. The USB2.0 connection is a tad of a bottleneck so I avoid installing games there but for music, video, general files its fine.

The small IDE cable broke once and a larger one didn't work properly. Because of the way they did returns I ended up with a brand new unit .

 

[Asus]

I have an off-brand 400gb external hard drive (samsung drive inside) and it works great for saving large files (video recordings if what I use it for). The USB connection is a little slower than a regular hard drive.

Also you have to be aware of what speed port you are plugging it into. A USB 2.0 port has a theoretical speed of 480mbps yet a USB 1.1 port only can do 12mbps. And most USB ports on the front of cases, extra ports on keyboards and LCD monitors are USB 1.1.

 

[hungryduck]

just buy a cheap IDE HD and a decent external enclosure for 30 bucks....thats what did - works great.

 

[WhiteZero]

just buy a cheap IDE HD and a decent external enclosure for 30 bucks....thats what did - works great.

Some of the externals out there can actually come out cheaper than buying an enclosure and poping an internal hard drive in there.

 

[ShinRa]

ive had my external for almost 2 years now. its a 120 gig western digital. its saved my life. all my precious invaluable pictures/music/videos all get backed up daily and im ready for the worst case scenario

 

[Gray Fox]

Does anyone know weather or not this drive supports Highspeed USB and comes with a highspeed USB 2.0 cable?
If you have no idea what I am talking about see this page:
http://lyberty.com/tech/terms/usb.html

 

[Adabiviak]

You can get external SATA hard drives now - shouldn't those be quick?

 

[Asus]

It doesn't say specifically if it is Full Speed or Hi Speed cable but I would guess that it is Hi Speed. I doubt they would give you a slow cable. Internal IDE hard drives never come with a ATA100 cable, they always come with the faster ATA133 cable (just an example).

You can get external SATA hard drives now - shouldn't those be quick?

Although you could only plug it into a PC with an external SATA port...basicly your machine. I don't know anyone who has those even though they are out on the market.

 

[lePobz]

I've got one of those USB2 HDD enclosure cases that convert any ATA drive to an external drive. I dropped a 120GB western digital in there, and it's got backups from all of my home machines on it. I wouldn't use it for everyday use, but it's fast and reliable for backups and the extra peace of mind.