help with external hdd's. are they reliable?

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hazza

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hi guys! ive come to the point in my life where i feel i need to give my pooter a fresh install lol. the deal is, i need some more storage anyways, due to having just over 60gb lol. i was going to buy a nice big internal hdd, but then it came to me that an external one would be handy, so i am swayed towards this now. so my plan was to buy a nice big (not too big lol) external hdd, put all my crap on it, and the clean install windows xp, vista, and kubuntu on my internal hdd, leaving the external for useless rubbish that i dont need but cant bare to delete . so after making the brilliant plan in my head i started searching for externals, it seems that you can pick up good one up for quite cheap these days, all was going well until i asked my step dad what his external was like. he STRONGLY advised me not to trust one as he did the same as me one day, putting all data on it and installing windows freshly, and lost all of his data on it. it just dissappeared! he safely removed it every time so we have no clue where the data went!

so my question is, has anyone ever had any problems with externals? has anyone got any better ideas? anyone got anything they can advise me on?


thanks harry
 
I've had an issue with one once... but it was a 2.5 drive... not a full size one. but what you could do, is make a drive... take your old drive out and buy an enclosure. take the new hard drive your going to get and put it in your machine... this way you get your clean install, and all of your data... PLUS it has your OS on it from before if something goes wrong.
 
Yea basically the external drives are the same exact drives as the internals the only difference is the tend to run a little warmer and can be slower if using usb or firewire. If you want to run at the speed closer or faster than that of the internal IDE drives you should consider getting one of seagate's new external SATA drives or as "apokalipse" suggested put a big new drive in the system and the older one in an enclosure. But depending on the age of the system you may run into the 147gb hd restriction that seem to plauge older systems.
 
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