250 GB Extrenal Hard Drive for $69...?

I was checking out external hard drive since I'll probably pick on up in the US. Have prices really fallen this much?

http://shop1.outpost.com/product/5030915

They also have a Maxtor 500 GB for $219...

 

Samsung has 400gig SATA2 HDDs for $110 over at newegg.com. I bought myself one from there. In the next few months Hitachi will be releasing a 1TB HDD for MSRP of $400.

 

Something makes me kind of ancy about storing all of my stuff on a $70 no-name hard drive. Anyone else :shrug:

 

Yeh. A lot of those 'unheard' of companies tend to have low quality HDDs. I remember working one one a customer bought at CompUSA trying to access their data. The device had refurbished Maxtor Drives and were obviously out of warranty. Luckily, the device as itself was under warranty and the customer returned it to CompUSA but with all their data lost.

 

Cheap drive = bad night! Don't do it.

Yakumo

 

heh

Well I wasn't going to buy it....just didn't know the lowest price had dropped to that point.

Now that's I've got your attention I might as well as another question...

Can you have two PCs hooked up to the same external hard drive at the same time without the use of a switch? Do new HDDs have this ability?

Thanks!

 

If I were you , I d buy a standard internal SATA drive (good brand) and enclose it in a case. That should come around 80 dollars

 

Its possible, but I don't know of any device that boasts such functionality. It would depend on the external enclosure you have the HDD hooked up not the HDD. Kinda like a NAS (Network Attached Storage). If you get an external enclosure that is USB, you can hook up the USB cable from the enclosure to a USB hub and have the PCs hook up to the USB hub. Don't know if it works but worth a shot if each PC recognizes the drive.

 

Is that 1TB disc like the LaCie disks? Which is basically not 1 but a few disks in an external case in raid, which you do see as a big drive from your OS.

 

I'm about 99% sure this is impossible. Onboard drive controllers have no sense of collision detection so there is nothing to keep data from being corrupted, not to mention the crosstalk involved between both PC's. In fact, I'm not sure of any (non networking)device that can plug into more than one computer at the same time and function on both. You would need to either a.) switch the drive back and forth manually b.) install the drive on one computer and turn it into a network share (easily done on winXP, linux, or OSX) or c.)buy a NAS and connect it straight to your network.

I beleive he's referring to a 1TB standard 3.5" plain-jane hard drive. Now that perpendicular storage is being realized, we're starting to get much larger drives.

 

I want to store video and music onto the HDD. Option #2 is streaming which doesn't work for video without a loss a quality, correct? One PC is hooked up to my TV (laptop) and I have my desktop. I want to be able to access the movies files from both depending on where I am....

Argh!

 

Best just to go and buy an internal 250Gig drive then dump it in to a USB drive case. That's what I did. Bought a buffalo 250Gig which actually turned out to be a Samsung Drive ! Anyway, the outer cases are dirt cheap from somewhere like Applied near the Monorail in Kokura. I picked up an USB 2 aluminium one with cooling fan for 1000 yen. That is a much cheaper solution than actually buying one of those external hard drives that look pretty flash.

Yakumo

 

daisy-chaining FW drives could be a solution.

hook the drive to a PC, then connect another PC via fire-wire, to the first PC. See what happens. It *should* work.

(having the HDD in the middle doesnt, although it allows TCP/IP LAN over the HDD , the HDD commits itself to the first PC connected)

 

Use USB2/Firewire/ESata and you'll be fine. I stream stuff from my computer and wireless laptop to my Xbox with no problem. Granted I'm not using an external drive, but as long as you use one of the aformentioned standards, any issues you would encounter certainly won't be bandwidth related. Streaming a file doesn't reduce quality, re-encoding it does.

I don't know that I would consider this "daisy chaining". If both computers are on a network to begin with, then all you are doing is creating another network centralized to firewire with one computer being the server, pretty much worthless if your original network is set up properly. FWIW I remember trying to do this at my last job over win2k sp4 to an XP box and it was impossible, windows would crash no matter what regardless of the type of computer I was using. Maybe it will work okay on XP to XP.

 

I ve tried this on XP to XP.

 

Results?

 

as I said, PC-FWDRIVE-PC makes the drive appear on BOTH computers. HOWEVER, it is accessible for both read and write (or was it just write) by the first connected computer. TCP/IP over the drive worked fine , in forming a LAN between the two computers.

 

This is precisely what I would do if I needed an external hard drive, unless you can get a damn good deal on a Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor, etc. Enclosures are cheap as dirt (~$30-40 for a nice one) and you'll wind up paying less overall. I was going to go this route with my laptop, until I just decided it was a better idea to get an internal hard drive.

 

hey, i just said that so many posts ago quote me quote me!

 

Now there`s a good idea!!!!!

I was thinking of getting another HD in my PC shortly as easier and cheaper than a external one, made my life easier now :thumbsup: