I'm looking for an external hard drive to buy for my computer, I'm looking them up on newegg, does anyone have any recommendations?
I'm looking for a capacity of 500GB-1TB, and I'm will to spend up to about 110$ or so.

I would like opinions on which Brand you recommend especially.

In my experience, the only things that are important in an external HD are space, size, price, and looks (if you really care)... I'd personally just decide what size you want, and then find the HD that's cheapest.

I have a 250 Gig external HD, so i can't really make any recommendations. Sorry.

For the external hard drives, they usually put their cheaper, lower-grade hard drives into the enclosure. There are some exceptions, though. Look for how long the warranty period is. Within drives by the same company, longer warranty periods are typically used for their higher-grade drives. Warranties usually range from 1 to 5 years with many external drives being only 1 or 2.

You are looking for a full-size drive and not a compact one, correct? (judging from price range and capacity)


By the way, if you don't mind having to do some assembling, you could also get a drive and a separate enclosure instead of one of the pre-assembled ones. You probably won't save any money, but you will be able to pick the drive that goes inside. Of course, then you have two things you would need to pick out, since there are a variety of enclosures, not all of them being good ones.

Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on Jan 10 2010, 2:07 am by ShadowFlare.

I use the 500gb western digital passports because I travel a lot and they don't require a power source. ( I have several )

If you're a tech junkie then USB 3.0 is slowly creeping into the market and its reportably 10x faster then USB 2.0 and harddrives should be arriving soon!

USB 2.0 maxes out at 60 MB/s per controller, which is pretty much as fast as most 5400 RPM drives are going to do. Even then, hard drive companies aren't putting those hard drives into a usb interface, but rather, esata or firewire. These charts show usb drives maxing out at around 30 MB/s. When you think about it, 30 MB/s is actually QUITE fast, and is much faster than LAN (12.5 MB/s) or WLAN (7.5 MB/s).

USB 3.0 will be backwards compatible, but only the port, so you'd have to buy a new computer/laptop/card for it to work. Read more here. Looks like Intel is waiting until 2011 to support it.

If you want fast, the best bet is esata, which is at 3 Gbps, whereas USB 3.0 will be at 4.8 Gbps. The fastest hard drives (ssd, actually) on the planet with upwards of 250 MB/s tops out at 2Gbps.

However, that being said, try to get a 2.5" drive rather than a 3.5" drive. They are faster in access time, which is quite important, and they are much smaller. However, you can always grab a recert like this

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 13 2010, 9:16 pm by rockz.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/185972/first_usb_30_tests_western_digitals_my_book_sails_through.html?tk=rel_news

Western digital hard drives (announced at CES) comes with a USB 3.0 PCI card to upgrade your current desktop

Also in article, max speed of 3.0 is 4.8 Gbps however hard drives are maxed out at 3 Gbps