Hard drive recommendations wanted.

[Bol]

Although I have a desktop with plenty of memory in my office, at home I use a laptop with only 60 gigs of memory, and I am thinking of getting an external hard drive to store music. I tried this once before, but the hard drive I purchased was so noisy that it did not serve its purpose and I sent it back. Can anyone recommend a relatively inexpensive and quiet hard drive? I am thinking of something like 250-300 gigs. Physical attractiveness would be a plus. Thanks in advance.

[Indestructible!]

Go with SEAGATE drives... I've got a bunch of them (ranging from 100GB to 750GB in size), and they have always worked perfectly for me. The prices are really starting to come down, and every now and then places like Fry's Electronics will offer a variety of rebates on these drives (the last one I used was for $100 off a $200 drive... not a bad deal there!).

Cheers,

Shane

[.:.impossible]

I have a couple of LaCie drives that are very quiet. Very quick too. They look fine and are in extremely durable casings. Look for deals and pounce.

[Sundog]

I have a couple of Maxtor (One Touch Series) HDs. They came bundled with EMC's Retropect Express software. Quite versatile software.

Maxtor HDs

[mjzee]

I have a Maxtor and a Western Digital, and they're both fast and quiet. I've had a SimpleTech, which was really noisy, almost like the fan's defective.

If your computer has a FireWire port, look for an EHD that can use either FireWire or USB 2.0...your FireWire port's probably unused, and this would leave you a USB port for something else.

[John L]

I have LaCie and Maxtor 500 GB external drives. I like them both, but have a slight preference for the Maxtor. It is a bit faster and seems a bit better matched for a PC (the LaCie was built for Apple, I believe). They are both quiet, the Maxtor especially. Western Digital also get excellent reviews.

Edited September 19, 2007 by John L

[Z-Man]

My collection of 900+ CD's now lives as FLAC files on two 250GB Western Digital My Book Pro Edition drives. These are backed up to a single 750GB Seagate.

I highly recommend the WD's. Near silent and run very cool. Solid as a rock so far.....

[mr jazz]

I've been very happy with the 3 IOmega external HDs I've bought from buy dot com. Basically plug and play but I also reformatted them to NTSC.

[Dave Garrett]

I've been very happy with the 3 IOmega external HDs I've bought from buy dot com. Basically plug and play but I also reformatted them to NTSC.

NTSC? Do you mean NTFS? There is apparently a way to switch the filesystem on hard drives from FAT32 to NTFS without reformatting them - it's a relatively simple command-line switch. I have one external drive that I failed to notice was default-formatted as FAT32 before I loaded 100+ GB of FLAC files onto it, but I've never felt brave enough to try to perform the filesystem switch as I don't have a good set of complete backups for the drive.

[mr jazz]

yes, I meant the NTFS format. Certainly would like that command though reformatting not a biggie-set it up at night and it's finished in the morning.

[Dave Garrett]

Certainly would like that command though reformatting not a biggie-set it up at night and it's finished in the morning.

My external hard drive claims to be full, but it's not

This is the first reference I stumbled across after I experienced this problem when I tried to copy a >4GB DVD ISO image to the drive in question. There's also a Microsoft KnowledgeBase article that covers the conversion:

How to convert a FAT16 volume or FAT32 volume to an NTFS file system in Windows XP