Advice on purchasing external hard drive

Hi Everyone,

I'm looking to increase the capacity of my Gateway M-6864FX's hard drive (7200 RPM 200GB I think - 170 effectively) and was thinking the easiest way to do this would be to just get an external drive. I'm trying to decide whether I should just use the USB2.0 interface my laptop comes with, or if I should try getting an adapter (PCMCIA i think?) that has eSATA or USB3.0. The problem I have with this is I've heard the PCMCIA limits the speed of these anyway, and I'm wondering if the extra speed is worth it, especially considering that some of these adapters are not very convenient (easy to break, slide out, etc.)

Basically what I'm looking for is:
-around 1TB Capacity
-Fast enough to view video straight off the HDD (the highest res video I watch is 720p although that's rare).
-Would be nice if it was easy to move around, but not as important as other stuff.

I was looking into a 1TB WD Element drive on newegg (WDBAAU0010HBK-NESN) that uses usb2.0, as its pretty cheap right now, think with a code you can get it down to $64 total, but reviews say it only does 20-25MB/sec

Thanks for any advice!

 

eSATA is definitely worth it - even over PCMCIA (or, do you mean CardBUS?).

I have used both (ExpressCARD and CardBUS eSATA ports) and the difference over USB2 is not even funny. Especially if you want to view video right off the external.

Good luck.

 

So I looked into it a little more carefully. According to Gateway's website I have: One ExpressCard™ Type 54 Expansion Slot. I saw a couple addon cards that had a 6gpbs esata, any idea if its worth trying since I'm already limited by using an expresscard?

Was thinking of getting one of these 2:
Newegg.com - StarTech ECESATA254 2 Port ExpressCard 54mm eSATA Controller Adapter Card
Newegg.com - Rosewill RC-605 SATAII ExpressCard 2 x SATA

Any advice on a good/cheap external drive to go with these? Or should I get my own enclosure w/ an internal drive?

Thanks for the help thus far!

 

Expresscard is not limiting to any eSATA hard drive. There is a huge difference in bandwidth between that and PCMCIA. Just get the Rosewill one because it is cheaper.

But also remember that you will probably be spending twice as much for this setup over the USB external drive.