Bill Gates the Genius!?(external HD?)

[Burnie Burnerson]

You know how windows has a setting to use compressed or uncompressed data? I take it you can still compress your data like normal right? I seen a couple 300 gig bee-uties around 350$cdn. Defragging must be a chore for you guys or not?

[spidross01]

Yeah matey, will work with both compressed and uncompressed, windows sees it as another hard drive installed, it doesn't really care if it is external or not, the only thing affected is the transfer speed, but if you buy a fast enough HD then you won't really worry about it

As for the defragging mate, i have had the drive approximately 10months and windows still says i don't need to defrag, but i do anyway and takes approximately an hour, normally start defragging just before i go out and leave it. I store all my mp3's docs and pics on it, doesn't use up my internal space and can access when i want

I would definately not be without it!! Also have a look on ebay, i have just found an Maxtor 300gb external drive with 16mb cache with all power supplies, cables etc for approx $210 canadian, the exchange rate i used was approximately $2 cnd to the £1, mate that is cheap as chips as they say in Uk. I paid the same price for a 200gb 10 months ago and thought that was good.

Honerstly mate they are a godsend and once you get one you will wondwer what you did without one!!!

if you want an ebay address for them let me know

[Luciel]

Originally Posted by spidross01

Yeah matey, will work with both compressed and uncompressed, windows sees it as another hard drive installed, it doesn't really care if it is external or not, the only thing affected is the transfer speed, but if you buy a fast enough HD then you won't really worry about it

Doesn't matter how fast the hard drive is as it will always be limited by the usb2 speed which is always slower than internal hdd speeds.

[DABhand]

Go for SATA only if your motherboard has SATA conns on it. Dont buy a SATA PCI card, as you will be limited to PCI Bus speeds.

[spidross01]

Originally Posted by Luciel

Doesn't matter how fast the hard drive is as it will always be limited by the usb2 speed which is always slower than internal hdd speeds.

think i said earlier in my previous post my heartys that it will be limited to the speed of usb2,

also if he is only looking for an EXTERNAL drive for data etc then whats the point of a sata drive? He is still limited to the usb transfer speed!

[Burnie Burnerson]

Would it be better to use my external for my movie and music collection and keep game files on my WD2000 HDD? Or does that matter? Part of my thinking is that this will also be my backup for my internal HDD? How does that work exactly?

[spidross01]

Yeah mate thats the general idea and works really well for me, i put all my data files, music, backups, and any other bits that i don't use regularly.
I use the Main hard drive(internal one) to run all the software games etc.

That way i can take all my bits with me if i need to or if anything goes totally wrong with my internal then i have got it all safe and sound on another drive, presuming that is that that doesn't suffer the same fate!! LOL!

I also wipe my system totally every 3-4 months and with everything on the external drive i don't need to worry about losing everything when i do the wipe, just turn it off and then format the internal!!! Easy.

As you said you were thinking of using it as backup then that is no probs, you can copy all your documents, files etc even game saves and settings onto the external. So until you delete the files on your main drive you will have duplicate. I always keep mine connected and on so access is ok, let us know how you get on