External Hard Drive

honestly, for reliability, you're better off getting an internal with an external chassis...it appears the externals don't have as long a live as internals do.

If size is not an issue you can go with the Speedano 3 which holds any regular cheap IDE hard drive and it support both USB 2.0 and IEEE1394

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8700557872&category=51080

I own one and it never fails me.

I second firewire, and you can get a cheap card for your laptop. And since you have a laptop, and may want to take your data with you, I recommend this:

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=757177

It is the Firelite 100GB self powered drive, and it is small and portable and fits in your hand.

We have a few of these at work and are great!

X

I would recomend (firewire or usb - some have both actually)

But Im with falnfenix I would stick with an enclosure and put an internal hardrive in it... it will typically last longer and even be cheaper since they charge wayy to much for external ones... Also make sure its one with an AC adaptor as large hd's take power to spin...

I actually use a small 40 GB lappy HD in an external case to carry around all the files I need when fixing up peoples comp and transfering files...

You can actually upgrade your laptop. You'll have to take it to a computer shop so they can open it up and swap in a bigger HD, but that's a little more useful (and portable) than an external harddrive.

get at least a 80GB. I bought a 40 and realized i had far too much Porn and music, and its full already. Its also a Buslink and really loud and annoying when on.

how much was the Maxtor?

FYI...You can sometimes get these things alot cheaper at a computer show.

http://www.marketproshows.com/computershows/showschedule.php

They sell everything you can think of for a computer. If you even take your laptop, they can usually install things for you if you buy it from them (ie: memory, etc).

Western Digital is not a bad company. I've always had WD harddrives and had no complaints. One time, one of my WD harddrives went bad and when I called the company, they told me to send it in and about two weeks later, i got a new harddrive. Excellent customer service and products. The only harddrive that is not a WD is my removable backup drive. That harddrive is a Maxtor. still no complaints there.

good choice of the external hard drive.
i have 2 of those.work really well!

and it is not true that the external has less of a life than the internal

maxtor is a good company so you made a good choice.... personally I like the internal hard drives in an external box because you can swap them around if needed but if you just need storage then you are set with that...

I actualy have no external HD's on my main computer... although I also have 674GB of storage space LoL

ehhh...i beg to differ.

i have 640gb. Damn you!

I have 950 GB in my main computer 400 GB Seagate, 300 GB Western Digital and 250GB Western Digital. And I have another computer right next to it that has 3 250 GB drives in it and 7 other computers in my house, I'm a storage whore

9 is actual pretty small..lol. My old professor had over 15 computers all networked in his basement in his house.

i have 6 networked in my house, but 950gb is enough for p0rn i would think..LOL

are they 7.2k, 10K, or 15K drives?

Used to have a small SCSI cluster (10 drive - 18GB, 15K rpm) - pretty fast, but made way too much noise, pretty much offsets the speed advantage that they offered. Newer enterprise SATA drives or even mainstream ATA drives offer similar speeds.

Since I program for a living and work with really big files that need to be processed for long periods of time, I own lots of equipment - one SGI O2+ visual workstation (killer case), two dedicated custom workstations running different flavors of processors and operating systems, a "play" system for PC games and surfing the web, laptop (wireless web surfing), XBOX turned into a gateway, PowerMac, and two spare single CPU boxes (one Intel and one AMD). All the older systems, I've given away to friends or family - the remainer gets donated to charities. Have a separate rackmount chassis for the workstation's storage - 8 disk Hitachi SATA 400GB drives in RAID 1+0 for speed and redundancy.

Might try the new WD SATA-2 with the 16MB cache, but will have to wait until I see some hard testing numbers or until my exisiting arrays fail. OS drives are mirrored WD Raptors, they did have a bad rep of failing faily quickly, but so far - they seems to be holding up pretty well.

What languages do you program in?