Comments | mixed_up_media: hard (drive) decision

mixed_up_media

hard (drive) decision

Mar 11, 2008 12:52

I need to buy an external hard drive, but I find myself unable to decide on one.

Part of my indecision perhaps comes from wanting it to do too much. My main purpose in buying it is to provide more storage space for my laptop, which unfortunately has a rather small hard drive. I would ideally like something portable that can draw its power from the ( Read more... )

hard drives, indecision, portable

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lietya March 11 2008, 18:10:12 UTC

We have an external 250-gig hard drive that's Western Digital, and I love it. More to the point, we paid about $120 for it, and that was two years ago. I think it *must* be possible to find a better example on the current market! Ours is not necessarily technically "portable," I guess, but I'll at least weigh in that it's the MyBook (there's a 500-gig version of it at Best Buy for $119, looks like) and at least for ME it's been perfectly sturdy and functional ( ... )

mixed_up_media March 11 2008, 18:31:43 UTC

Actually, I had just about settled on either the MyBook or the Passport (both by Western Digital)--they both seem to be a good value for the money. So it's good to know that you're happy with yours.

Perhaps I *will* ask llnaughty about it, though.

(And by the way, I wrote to Western Digital to ask about a minor issue relating to the Passport drives, and they gave me a prompt reply, which I always consider a good sign.)

lietya March 11 2008, 19:10:38 UTC

That is especially good to hear - good customer service is rare these days, and reassuring!

llnaughty's the sweetest guy imaginable, and he loves doing this sort of thing. :) though of course I hope you find a simpler solution, sooner.

llnaughty March 13 2008, 06:14:32 UTC

aww thanks for the compliments. and for thinking of me ( ... )

llnaughty March 13 2008, 06:16:56 UTC

oops, mixed-up-media, i meant to address the second paragraph (and the rest of the comment) to you. :-)

mixed_up_media March 13 2008, 15:31:08 UTC

No problem. And thanks very much--you've been incredibly helpful! :)

llnaughty March 13 2008, 15:53:42 UTC

any time!

mixed_up_media March 14 2008, 17:51:28 UTC

Say, do you mind if I friend you?

llnaughty March 14 2008, 18:00:37 UTC

not at all. do you mind if i friend you?

mixed_up_media March 14 2008, 18:03:50 UTC

Not at all! :)

lietya March 13 2008, 11:46:08 UTC

And thank YOU for once again being willing to ride to the rescue! :) You really do know your stuff. I'm actually saving this comment for future reference.

(That terabyte drive still scares me. I still think 250 Gb is a big drive!)

doctorhook March 12 2008, 18:39:18 UTC

Honestly, there's probably yet another option - buy a sturdy, smallish portable for the laptop, and another larger [but cheaper per-gig price] non-portable for backing up everything else. I bet you could find a combination that would come out to around that same $200 all told, if you shop carefully and maybe take some time to wait for sales.

I was going to say that, also. But instead I'm just going to clutter up your blog, apparently....

FWIW, I have a 500 GB Seagate FreeAgent Desktop drive and I've been happy with it, even though it's not portable. It does need to be plugged in, but I do move it around quite a bit and dropping it hasn't caused it to fail yet. :) It was a gift, though, so I didn't do any comparison shopping.

mixed_up_media March 13 2008, 03:50:55 UTC

I'm glad to know about your experience with the Seagate, since that's one of the drives I was considering!

lietya March 13 2008, 11:41:45 UTC

Now that sounds like a sweet hard drive!

I'm glad I wasn't the only one to think of it. :)

doctorhook March 13 2008, 15:29:50 UTC

Now that sounds like a sweet hard drive!

Yeah, it's really nice. Since we're a laptop school, we need professors to run the laptop orientation for 450 freshman every year. In return, the IT dept gives us volunteers some really nice gifts, which they must get on clearance for some ridiculous discount or something.

My only complaint is that I can't properly use the HD on both my Mac and my PC laptop. But I'm led to believe that's not the fault of the HD, it's an OS issue.

llnaughty March 13 2008, 15:53:11 UTC

My only complaint is that I can't properly use the HD on both my Mac and my PC laptop. But I'm led to believe that's not the fault of the HD, it's an OS issue.

the hard drive should have come formatted in fat32 which is read/write-able by both macs and windows systems. if it's not, you can always reformat it into fat32, but of course that'd require you to find temporary storage for whatever files are on the drive.

(unless by "properly use" you mean that the drive can't be formatted in a way that takes maximum advantage of each environment: hfs+ for macs, ntfs for windows.)

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