Need an Article or User Input on External Hardware

[Graham]

Hey guys,

I've noticed the external hard drive prices are INSANELY lower than what they used to be some years ago... and I WANT ONE!

Anywho, I'm primarily a seagate fan for internal hard drives, but I'm not really positive the external hard drive world is the same so here goes:

1) What brand is most favored for external hard disks?

2) Is 500 or 1,000 gig drives fast enough to stream music/videos to your PC?
a) Is USB 2.0 or eSATA the way to go?

3) Pre-made external enclosure or buy my own and mount it?

Well, I think that's really all I can ask for external hard drives unless someone disagrees.

Thanks in advanced for any replies!

 

[hikaricloud]

Well, if you have a firewire port, I would get something that supports firewire.

As much as it pains me to say it, the WD externals are pretty nice. The older ones had heat issues (ie: mine.) but the newer ones run alright. They are pre-formatted as FAT32, so they work on both PCs and Macs.

Seagates are alright, I prefer them as my internal HDDs, but I haven't had the best of luck with the FreeAgent series. I'm sure someone else will also have an opinion though.

 

[Graham]

LOL "ie mine"

I've been there before haha. Thanks for the info!

 

[Hefemeister]

I agree with Hikaricloud. Firewire is nice to have as it is faster but is not totally necessary as it will add some cost to the external enclosure. I have has several western digital drives and have been very happy with them. (knocks on wood)

esata is very nice and fast the catch is a lot of systems have them at this point. If you plan to move your drive around to other computers usb will be compatible with any system worth working on.

 

[hikaricloud]

Most drives will come with USB regardless, I like the idea of having the different connectivity options for different machines, because if a machine has firewire, it's loads faster than USB, since it's a constant stream instead of having burst speeds dependent on the CPU. eSATA is nifty to have to, though I haven't had to use it yet.

Definitely look at some of the WD drive out there, there are some good deals.

 

[philbar71]

if you want the fastest then you should get a drive with ESATA. and WD makes pretty good drives

 

[[Judge]Iceman]

I have 3 FreeAgent Seagates that have performed flawlessly. The 750 has the eSATA, the 250's only have USB I believe. A couple of my friends have WD's and haven't had any problems with them either. Both of those companies have solid products IMO. It comes down to personal preference and what you need/want it to be capable of.