External Hard Drive

[tkirch]

I would like to hear some thoughts and opinions on this.  I have never used an external HD, but I noticed my laptop HD is getting full.

Could someone answer some questions on them for me?

Is there one that you recommend?
Can I Boot From Them?
Could I play Sim City from an external HD?
How big should I get?
If you have one, what do you use it for?

And anything else you want to tell me about them.

[JoeST]

Is there one that you recommend?
Anything but maxtor  just because one blew up on me.... and another on a friend.. but other than that
go for a SATA USB2.0 (stands to reason really its the fastest there is)
Can I Boot From Them?
of course... as long as your mother board is able to boot from USB (or other such devices)
Could I play Sim City from an external HD?
yes but i would not recommend it for speed related reasons... playing games over USB can get slow
How big should I get?
as big as you can afford or am willing to spend
If you have one, what do you use it for?
i had one... for file backup and i kept some games on it.. because i like to reformat my PC LOL

Hope this helps

Joe

[City Builder]

I believe you've already bought one but for anybody else that is thinking about getting an external hard drive, get one with a power button so that you can shut it down when you turn off your computer.  It's my belief that my Maxtor personal USB backup drive failed prematurely (after 2.5 years) because it's left on 24 hours a day 365 days a year, in essence it's never shut off because I was too lazy to pull the electric plug out of the back of it to turn it off.

Well just 3 days ago I started to see errors in windows xp telling me that a delayed write had failed to my I:\ drive and when I checked things out I found that the drive was failing.  I spent one entire night from 6pm till about 6 am the next morning pulling off the data that was on that external drive piece by piece because if I tried to pull too much data at one time the drive would stop responding so I had to pull the data almost file by file.  But I did manage to get about 90% of my data pulled to one of my internal drives.  If I ever decide to buy another external drive I'll be making sure it has a power button so that I can shut it down when I turn off my computer.  I suppose however that it just could have been a fluke, I mean after 2.5 years the drive had only been running for about 21,888 hours (24hours/day x 365 days/year x 2.5 years) and it seems to me from memory that most drives say they are good for over 100,000 hours so.... Take this with a grain of salt but still in my opinion, heat buildup inside the enclosure and running 24/7... Maybe.

[RebaLynnTS]

I have never cared for Maxtor, have had a lot of bad luck with them. I have WD Book drive, so far, so good (2 years old).