Advice on External Hard Drive purchse

I have an HP dv1000 laptop running Windows XP Pro. I would like to purchase an external hard drive for back up and storage purposes.

Would like it to include back-up software and must have ease of use and economically priced.

Western Digital is the only name I have heard of - other suggestions please?

Mods, if this in the wrong thread please correct.

TIA

cassi

 

Well, I dont personally like Western Digital, so I made my own external harddrive, with a 1TB Hitachi hdd and two fans, and a sata to usb converter. It is stored in a custom metal box I made.
As far as purchasing external drives, the Seagate Freeagents are Good. Hitachi only has only just started to sell their own external harddrives.
I prefer Hitachi drives for the quality and longevity, and since I could not find one, I built it myself.

K-TRON

 

western digital is perfect for what you need, i bought this one for my dad: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136175
500gb My Book essential 2.0 - $135

if you plan to use it for more than just back ups or storage...like if you plan to leave it on 24/7, i'd recommend buying an internal hard drive and mounting it into an external enclosure...but that wont have built in backup software.

 

I have 3 or 4 USB external hard drives. Some IOMega, some Maxtor. Last time I was in Costco they had some good prices. The office stores (e.g.: Staples, OfficeMax, ...) often do as well. Look for sales. Be sure to get USB 2.0, there's probably still some USB 1.1 devices on the shelves. The price/GB point keeps getting better. The first one I got was a 160GB, then 250GB, then 7200RPM 500GB.

There's also all-in-one solutions like the BounceBack. It looks like there's a 10% discount if BounceBack is ordered directly from the CMS Website. My lady has one she uses for her XP laptop and it works for her. She says there's some maintenance needed when major changes are made, such as moving a lot of photo images off to another external drive, or running a cleanup process; otherwise, a subsequent restore would put all that back! I suppose a fresh full copy would accomplish the same thing. Anyway, it seems to work well for her.

I do a full drive image backup using Paragon Drive Backup and backup specific user data separately (manually), myself.

BTW, Welcome to NBR, Cassi!

 

are you looking for a 2.5" self powered solution or a 3.5" where you need to carry a power adapter around as well?

 

Either would work for me.

Thanks for the responses everyone.

cassi

 

For prebuilt, you pretty much need to decide on what brand you would feel comfortable with. Some don't like Western Digital, other's don't like Seagate. It's preference.

If you're going to build your own, that is a different story.

In terms of storage space and dollar/gigabyte, 3.5" drives are the way to go by far. If you need more space, go with 3.5" drives. 500GB drives are pretty cheap now, and 750GB are dropping as are 1TB drives. Get an enclosure of your liking and it's a pretty easy install to do.

Hope that helps.

 

Thanks for the info. No way would I be able to build my own, absolutely no tech skills for the blonde.

Will have to be external, easy to set up and use are essential for me.

Thanks again