External 500GB cheaper!

HEADRAT · 2 May 2006 at 16:13

It seems very odd to me that external drives are cheaper:-

(Internal) Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB = £213.79

Rotational Speed: 7,200 RPM
Capacity: 500GB
Buffer: 16MB

(External) Western Digital WDG1U5000U MyBook = £196.17

Capacity: 500GB
7200 RPM
16MB Cache

:confused:

HEADRAT

HEADRAT · 2 May 2006 at 17:47

I know what you mean but you would think an external would be cheaper, why wouldn't you just buy the external drive and rip out the HD and save yourself £17

I don't think WD make an IDE 500GB drive so the drives inside the enclosure may be SATA.

HEADRAT

HEADRAT · 2 May 2006 at 19:26

Soul Rider said:
Well worth investigating for the money you can save. You gonna try it out?

I may just give it a whizz, I'm going to see if I can find out exactly what drive is in the external drive.

HEADRAT

HEADRAT · 2 May 2006 at 20:43

I wouldn't think the native drives interface would be anything other than IDE or SATA, pull the drive out and you've got a free external enclosure and your £17 better off.

If my suspisions are correct the internal drive will be a SATA device.

HEADRAT

HEADRAT · 2 May 2006 at 22:04

afraser2k said:
The external also does Firewire, so not that bad as an external drive? Maybe they're just trying to shift more external drives to the consumer?

Don't think the Western Digital WDG1U5000U MyBook does firewire?

HEADRAT

HEADRAT · 2 May 2006 at 23:01

HighlandeR said:
they should do that cos its still gonna be faster then USB and firewire put together...

Yep my MOBO has external SATA, problem is that a mechanical spinning disk medium wouldn't come close to saturating USB or Firewire, roll out IRam2 with a SATA2 interface

HEADRAT

HEADRAT · 2 May 2006 at 23:13

sr4470 said:
(the 480 figure is megabits per second, theres 8 bits in a byte of course)

Ah indeed my bad