Well I'm in need of buying an external hard drive for backup and data transfer between home and work.

I can't decide what I should do.

Should I...

1. Buy an already built external hard drive kit like the following:

http://www.aicmicro.com/productdetail.asp?id=28520

OR

2. Buy a hard drive enclosure and add whatever notebook drive I decide to purchase:

Enclosures:
http://sewelldirect.com/externalhden...num2.5inch.asp
http://www.xpcgear.com/byteccue930.html

Hard Drive:
http://www.aicmicro.com/productdetail.asp?id=27758


The reason why I'm debating between the two is mostly because I don't like the enclosure that the pre-built drive comes with. But at the same time it's a cheap kit with a good hard drive in it.



I'm open to all other suggestions as well.

 

Check out Lacie they make sexy drives.

 

Just one thing ... MAXTOR == EVIL

 

Lacie = Maxtor

Build your own. I've had good luck with Segate drives.

 

Yea, I've already learned that a LONG time ago.

MAXTOR =

 

Yea, i've never had a problem with seagate drives either.

I think they make the best drives on the market.

all 5 hard drives i own in my two machines at home are seagate and I've had them for over 3 years and no problems yet.

 

not a big fan of lacie, sorry.

 

Are you actually going to be carrying this so often that you need the pysical small size of a laptop drive? I'm asking because it seems like a waste of money to go this route. You can get the WD 160 GB drive for like $150.

 

I will be carrying this practically everyday for work and stuff.

So the size of the drive is a main factor in my decision. I thought about getting something larger which would be helpful. But when I was checking out the sizes of some of the 3.5" hard drive enclosure's some of those suckers are huge, one of em I came across was 8" long, 1.75" tall and 5" wide and all for an extra 60 GB.

 

I just found this article on Seagate's website:

"Finding the Ideal Disc Drive for 2.5" External USB Applications"

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/TP-535.pdf

 

You're the guy that works for JPL, right? I gotta ask, what are you carrying every day that needs this much space? Probability sets for spacecraft trajectories or something?

 

Yea, i'm the guy that works at JPL.

Basically I'm gonna be transferring data from home and work and using this drive as a another form of a backup of my data.

I wish I was working on spacecraft trajectories. I"m just a typical computer programmer stuck in a cubicle.

 

Are your machines in a Windows environment or *nix? Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think if you want two different Windows machines to access the files on the external drive, you have to format it with FAT32. If so, you'll basically have zero file system security on the removeable drive's contents. May or may not be an issue for you.

 

So you're allowed to take data out of the building?

 

If he's using Windows 2000 or XP he should be able to format the drive using NTFS. I have an external drive formated using NTFS that I use to move data between two seperate networks and have no problem reading the data.

 

I have a linux machine and an xp pro machine at home and at work.

I haven't decided on the file format of the hard drive because I may just write a script that will auto mount the drive on my linux box and copy the necessary files to their proper locations automatically so that I don't have to do anything when it comes to the actual act of updating/copying data.

 

yup as long as you protect it with your life.

 

You can get Simpletech 250gb drives on deal for about $35 AR. I have two of them.

 

thanx for the tip...

but a little big on the portablity side.

 

Alright so I thought I'd post what I decided to do.

I am going to build my own pocket drive. Which is a lot cheaper and I get exactly what I want.

I decided to go with:

Toshiba 100GB 2.5" Hard Drive (Model #MK1032GAX)Adaptec 2.5" USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure


The cool thing my work will be purchasing it so I don't have to worry about the cost of the unit which is still under $300 and is ultra-portable.

Locally I could have purchased this setup myself for about $225 which isn't bad at all.

Thanx to all for your input.

 

go to newegg.com lots of enclosures for real cheap!!

 

Yea I did visit their site.

They do have a lot of enclosure's but a lot of the enclosures that are out there on the market aren't that great. Adaptec's enclosure may be a little bit more compared to the others, but it's a higher quality enclosure.

And since my work's paying for it I may as well get the better quality enclosure.

 

I got one of these: http://www.techimo.com/articles/i82.html
and put one of these in it: http://www.westerndigital.com/en/pro...asp?DriveID=10

Western Digital is awesome. I love my setup. But you may want to look into their 120 or 160 GB ones, they are alot cheaper now than they were when I made my external harddrive

 

thanx,

but I was going for something really small and very portable because it's for transfering files to and from home and work.

The size of the enclosure I bought is so damn small, and with a 100GB of storage space it's a great little gadget.

 

Understandable. I just leave mine on top of my computer for the extra space

 

After purchase thoughts.

First off thanx to everyone that gave suggestions.

I ended up going with an Adaptec 2.5" Enclosure and a Seagate Momentus 100GB notebook drive.

I've had it for about 2 weeks now and it works great.

The enclosure is sweet. Aluminum casing, keeps the drive cool. The enclosure kit also came with a really nice leather case. It came with a USb Y-cable; however, because the seagate hard drive is a low power consumption drive to begin with, it only requires one of the cables so it only takes up one USB port. Since it's USB 2.0 it's really fast in transfering files too.

The bonus of it all. I went to fry's to buy it all, thinking I was gonna dish out $200 just for the hard drive. The salesman there told me it was on sale for $180 even though it wasn't listed so I saved a little bit to. good timing.

I would recommend this setup to anyone that wants a lot of storage in a very small compact device.