They have a Buffalo 7200 RPM 500Gb external hard drive on sale at Fry's for $129 after rebates. I really need some more space soon. Does anyone know anything about this brand, I couldn't find much about it, except it is fairly simple, works, and may not be able to be formatted to NTFS, it comes Fat32. It will only be used for storing photos and won't be running programs or anything like that. Any advice would be great, or if you know of some other quality large external hard drive done on the cheap, I am open to suggestions. Thanks
Joe
I haven't used their hard drives, but the company itself has a very good reputation for engineering and support. FWIW, Costco sells external 500GB Maxtor Firewire/USB drives for $189. Firewire is generally faster than USB 2.0 despite the listed specs.
I haven't used their hard drives, but the company itself has a very good reputation for engineering and support. FWIW, Costco sells external 500GB Maxtor Firewire/USB drives for $189. Firewire is generally faster than USB 2.0 despite the listed specs.
Thanks, although I don't know how much speed I really need, if it just for storage, I have a maxtor 100 gig USB and it suits me fine except that I filled it up. Currently I am holding all my photos on my Wolfpac 80 gig portable hardrive, the one you can download straight on to, and it makes me very nervous to have all that stuff in place that if droppped...
Edit:Thanks for the spelling fix :)
I haven't used their hard drives, but the company itself has a very good reputation for engineering and support. FWIW, Costco sells external 500GB Maxtor Firewire/USB drives for $189. Firewire is generally faster than USB 2.0 despite the listed specs.
Isn't that only Firewire 800? Firewire 400 is a bit slower than USB 2.0. At least from what I've read.
About six weeks ago, I also bought a Western Digital 0.5 Terrabyte (500 Gb) drive for $199 from Best Buy (brick-and-mortar location). It may be less expensive today.
I have a maxtor 100 gig USB and it suits me fine except that I filled it up.
The Buffalo drive should be just fine. If you'd rather go with a "known" brand, here's a 500GB Seagate drive for $150 (no rebate needed).
hmmm, need food and rethink my plan, I like the (no rebate needed), and could wait a few more days.
Decided to go with this one, thanks Shannon. It has better support from what little I could find on Buffalo, they don't have a lot of tech support, just in case I need it. And for $20 dollars more and no need to wait for the rebate I like this option bettter. Thanks everyone for your input.
Joe
One more question, is it hard to format to NTFS? When I got my last hard drive, I had a friend come over and delete some programs and e did it for me.
One more question, is it hard to format to NTFS? When I got my last hard drive, I had a friend come over and delete some programs and e did it for me.
It should be easy, like formatting any other Seagate drive. They have a special software on their website to make life easy, and I think it'll work on any of their drives.
Firewire's advantage generally only holds if you have 1 external disc btw. If you start adding discs it doesn't bandwidth share as well, so performance to all devices degrades less gracefully then USB2.
There's also external SATA available now too(if your system supports it). Those will be faster then either firewire anything or USB 2.0 Full Speed, but have the same disadvantage of firewire(less ubiquitous then USB).
you can buy a hard drive housing for about $30 and convert any hard drive to an external hard drive. So if you are looking for the cheapest options check out the prices of internal drives as well.
External hard drives use to be a lot more expensive then internal, not sure if that's still the case though.
I converted an 80g drive from a old computer for photo storage.
