hey, Im looking at getting an external hard drive. probably 500 Gigs. just want to know if anyone has any sugestions. what make is the best. what should I look for, what should I avoid. Thanks for the help.
Avoid most no-name companies. I recommend Western Digital. I use a 500 Gig one at work and it's been running smooth the last 2 years. Definitely USB 2.0 if your computer supports it.
Usual suspects - Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital. Theres only a relatively small number of HD manufactures so even off-brand external units will likely have drives from somebody decent inside them, its just that you don't know which one its going to be or whether the controller boards are going to be as good. Considering how dirt cheap external HDs in general are thesedays, you might as well buy a first party unit anyway since the price difference is going to be pretty negligiable. Most companies still insist on shipping them with FAT32 partitions since any old shit can use them, so reformat it to NTFS if you only going to be using it with Windows versions from this decade and nothing else.
Internal is cheaper and faster, but Lacie makes nice firewire enclosures and they use Seagate which is a good drive maker.
i have a Western Digital 500gb MyBook USB/Firewire...works awesome, quiet, and portable if i had more USB ports, i'd get more...but i dont.
Love my WD externals, all three of 'em. Had a Lacie enclosure with a Seagate drive but after a couple years, something went really wonky with it and it wasn't worth the trouble of trying to fix it.
