Buy external harddrive now or later?

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akasixcon

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When is the best time to buy an external harddrive? Like you know how prices of computers drop and stuff. Is right now actually the best time to be buying an external harddrive or should I wait until later?

How much harddrive space would be ideal, meaning as much space available for the lowest cost. Like gb for gb price per dollar.
 
How much free space do you have on your computer now?
How much MORE free space are you looking to get (minimum)?
What is the budget for this (Maximum)?
You sure that you want external and not internal?
If external, how do you want the HDD to interface with the PC? USB, Firewire, wired LAN, wireless LAN...?

As far as when is the best time, you have to look for deals and sales, there really isn't a "Best time" for buying PC parts in general. There are ALWAYS new technologies coming out, and the high performance parts of yesterday are becomming cheaper as more advanced parts come out.

As far as looking at the Gb / dollar comparison, it is simple math. External solutions will generally cost MORE than internal solutions, as you are also purchasing the additional cables, and the enclosure itself.
 
Well said, Ethereal_Dragon.

I have seen 500GB Internal SATA hard drives for less money than what Newegg is offering today. You have to look for a "HOT" deal, and buy it when it happens. Never buy something on a regular non-sale day. It's a big mistake.
 
Yeah problem is that my harddrive is IDE. So I might as well settle for External.

I know it could be a rhetorical question but I might as well just answer it now.

How much free space do you have on your computer now?
-5-10 gb on a good day, always have to burn stuff on DVDs once I get below 5gb.

How much MORE free space are you looking to get (minimum)?
-Probably at least 250 gb.

What is the budget for this (Maximum)? I could spend as much as $400 if needed. Most likely in the $200 range though.

You sure that you want external and not internal?
Yeah as my motherboard is an IDE not a SATA connector.

If external, how do you want the HDD to interface with the PC? USB, Firewire, wired LAN, wireless LAN...?
Doesn't really matter. Whichever is cheapest. Firewire sounds good though.
 
What model motherboard do you have? If you have no SATA ports, you do still have some options. There is a costly upgrade to get a SATA controller card which will use a PCI slot, or (hopefully) you motherboard has a Primary & Secondary IDE channels, each of which will support TWO devices (thats 4 total). Since you have no SATA, (unless your motherboard is really old) I would suspect that you do infact have a secondary IDE channel which you can connect an additional HDD or Optical drive to. This being the case, I would recommend going IDE, as you will spend less money.

Also, I personally recommend Seagate drives, as they are currently #1 in the market. They have OUTSTANDING reliability, and 5 year warrenty on their drives.

There are 2 nice Seagate drives over at Newegg right now (they only ship US though)...

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3400620A 400GB
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630A 500GB

The 400 GB drive is more bang for the buck, $0.30 / GB vs. $0.32 / GB.
 
So external harddrives have slower transfer speed? I will be using a firefire port so it should speed up the trasnfer. But how much better is the speed of an internal hadrdrive than a firewire external harddrive?
 
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