Hey cheyo. I need to buy an external hard drive.. Any suggestions as to where to buy it, and what brand? Cause i really dont know much about hard drives.
From my experience:
There are two kind of external Hard Drives (HD): External, and external portable.
That is the first thing you need to deside. if you want something that you will like to leave home or something you want with you at all times.
external HD
If you something you would like to leave home there are many options specially if you just need to
back up things. Now if you need something faster than USB for video recording then firewire is the choice 400, 800 or the new 1600 or even eSata depending on what your pc has. It very important to realize that these HD are not meant to be carrie arround in a backpack because the disk might get ruin which is easy to do.
Portable external HD
Meannt to be carried with you. Most of the time these tend to be smaller and are USB. My recommendation is that you get one that gets power from the laptop instead of having to plug in to a jack, it defeats the purpose of being portable. Popular Mechanics has an article about the ones that can last longer
GET INSURANCE!!!
I can’t stress this point enough. While HD manufactures incluse standar insurance many dont recover the data and just send you a new one. With insurance you sometimes the offer to recover the valuable data for you for cheap. I cant tell you enought how much I hate to see some harddrive that a year ago cost me 500 dollars and now are just paper weights because they do not work anymore.
where?
I like the way Frys electronics way of dealing with insurance on HD and most of the time they have good offers. Alternative, BestBuy or alike also have some what alrite insurance but they seem harder to deal with.
You can find good deals online too like newegg.com or amazon.com and tons more but maybe their insurance is not as great as being able to go to a store and talking to someone face to face.
Favorites?
LaCie, Iomega, G-tech
Post your commets or questions. Thanks