So today I bought a 640 gb SATA hard drive, and a cheap USB/eSATA external enclosure. It was an impulse buy, and now that I am home, I think I want to reconsider. The HD only has 8mb of cache, and the cheezy/cheap external enclosure worries me. I can return it and get either of these 2 options in my price range... Micro Center - 500GB USB/eSATA Hard Drive Micro Center - FreeAgent Pro 500GB USB/eSATA/FireWire Hard Drive Whatever I get must have eSATA and USB2, be at least 500gb, and reliability would be important. I will be building a new pc soon, and I want to transfer data from the old to the new (dont want to install old HD in new computer). Then when the new computer is running use the drive for back up, and hopefully have it perform well enough to work with pictures/movies on the drive without transferring to the computer and without lag. If you guys have any experiences or suggestions I'd be happy to hear them. Thanks edit - I realize that both of the choices I gave still only have 8mb cache, but how important is this for what I want to do with the drive?
If you are just using the drive for storage and not constantly thrashing it, 8MB is not going to be the limiting factor. Save your money and buy an eSATA card (or eSATA riser if that is an option). That will be much faster than the USB and more than make up for the smallish cache.
Current computer that is on its way out only has USB, new computer will have an eSATA port, which is why I need it to have both. I would hope that whatever drive I went with I'd be able to watch movies and play music from it without being able to notice its an external drive. This would be while using the eSATA connection of course. Ive heard and read alot of good stuff about seagate, especially vs western digital.
Honestly, with IT as my profession/passion, I can say that I really only recommend Seagate for any IDE/SATA application.
+1 I've had Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Western Digital drives fail on me. Way before their "life" cycle was up. Seagates are the only ones that last.
This is exactly what I've experienced with my drives. It seems Maxtors and Seagates always fail on me and my friends.
$22 to $36 will get you a StarTech.com 1 Port PCI-Express eSATA Card Storage controller- Serial ATA-300- 300 MBps for your old computer. For limited use drives I use the WD or Seagate pre-built enclosures (typically the Extreme series with FW/USB/eSATA), I probably have 80 or 90 of those in the evidence locker. If I am going to thrash a drive regularly I use IBM or Hitachi in a Thermaltake Max4 enclosure.
Sorry Denzil. I think I worded that wrong, as I was recommending the Seagate drives. That's weird that you and your friends have had such bad luck. I can honestly say that I have never seen a Seagate fail.
