Ext. Hard drive worth the money?

[MissKat]

Originally Posted by LockedOut

Consider buying a HD and external case separately. External hard drives usually only come with a one year warranty. If you buy separately, the warranty on the hard drive is usually 3 or 5 years depending on the brand.

You mean as in getting a standalone desktop HD and putting it in an enclosure? If so, can you just use a reg internal desktop hard drive for this?

[Cliche]

Originally Posted by MoneyGuy

How hard is it to install an extenal HD?
(Usually comes with 2 or 3 cords, depending. Could be USB, Firewire, eSATA, or Ethernet. (Usually has usb) And Power connector. Usually plug and play. Shows up in either my computer, or the Finder.)

How tech savvy does one have to be? (Not very tech-savvy, organized yes.)

Is it just a matter of plugging it in somewhere and you're good to go? (yes depending)
Are external HDs much more costly than internals?(Yes they are more expensive because there is usually a chip inside the enclosure to connect the external hard drive to your computer. It does translating)

If the price is comparable, why not just install an external HD instead of an internal one, so that upgrading if you like (or unplugging it to take with you for security perhaps) is easy?(Drivers. And the scenario where you unplug the external hard drive and plug it back in. Maybe the operating system will know that you just plugged back in the original drive. Maybe you didn't, and the next time it goes to get an important file it needs to operate, it'll find nothing and crash.) Thanks for answers as this interests me.

If you are savvy enough with a screwdriver and the disk manager, or disk utility, you can just get an enclosure and your pick of hdd. So instead of some who knows potentially refurbed disk and controller, you know what is going inside, however the downfall is that any back up software that comes with the consumer packages is not available in the enclosure route.

Seagate is usually a good manufacturer, barring any recent firmware problems with their drives in a raid array. And then you can splurge on a 2TB drive.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by MoneyGuy

How hard is it to install an extenal HD? How tech savvy does one have to be? Is it just a matter of plugging it in somewhere and you're good to go? Are external HDs much more costly than internals? If the price is comparable, why not just install an external HD instead of an internal one, so that upgrading if you like (or unplugging it to take with you for security perhaps) is easy? Thanks for answers as this interests me.

Externals are more costly, and are slower to access. However they are the best thing since sliced bread IMHO, especially since I only own laptops now.

[MissKat]

Ok ive decided, im going to order this Iomega 1TB from Dell for $99 (one day sale). Was gonna get the Lacie but figured I might as well save the $60 since ive had good experiences with Iomega products years ago.

Its a 3.5'' 7200RPM drive but only has 2MB data buffer, should that be any concern?

[Cliche]

^USB interface is slower than native IDE or SATA so you shouldn't see any noticeable penalty with having an 2mb cache (although it shows 8 mb for me.)