Hard Drive Advice

SilkySmooth · 12 Mar 2007 at 12:58

Hi,

I am currently working, gaming, etc etc on my laptop and am getting fed up with constantly running out of space. I travel 3 or 4 times a year so it has just been easier to keep it all together on one drive. What I would like to do is get everything off the laptop and just leave the OS on the internal drive, but I am not quite sure what drives to get and what would be the best setup.

I am thinking along the lines of...

Laptop Internal Drive - Operating System only.
Drive 1 - All Gaming related files
Drive 2 - All work related applications (Dreamweaver, Adobe, etc)
Drive 3 - All work files (I am a programmer so have a lot).
Drive 4 - Backup drive to make regular copies of drives 1, 2 and 3.

My laptop has 3 x USB 2 and a Type II PC Card slot but I am not quite sure how I should go about setting up the above.

Any suggestions or recommendations?

squiffy · 12 Mar 2007 at 13:00

If you really need 4 drives, 1TB+ of space then I would look at a 4 bay USB2/Firewire/SATA enclosure. Looking at a fair bit of money though...if they even exist.

rpstewart · 12 Mar 2007 at 13:31

SilkySmooth said:
Any suggestions or recommendations?

How much of what you've suggested above needs to be portable?

ByteJuggler · 12 Mar 2007 at 17:09

As for connectivity, since the files being used/moved are large (in quantity and size), you really want to try to sacrifice as little speed to the transfer bus as possible (else you'll be waiting around unneccesarily.) To my mind, that makes USB and even Firewire (400) less than ideal. Firewire 800 would probably be OK, but I'd ideally rather suggest you get yourself a PCMCIA e-Sata card with, say, 2 e-Sata ports. Then try getting yourself (an) external enclosure(s) with e-Sata support and (a) suitable drive(s). Doing this will allow you to operate your drive(s) as fast as they'll go, all the while not sacrificing much if any speed to bus beign used. (In fact this setup will in all likelihood be faster than keeping the stuff on the internal disk, which should be nice :-)

)

SilkySmooth · 13 Mar 2007 at 11:57

Portability isn't really an issue, I only travel once or twice a year and that usually involves a 12 hour flight, after which I am settled for the next 6 months.

Thanks for the detailed response ByteJuggler. I have been looking at USB drives but was concerned that the transfer wouldn't be quick enough so I am going to go look and see if I can find one of these PCMCIA e-Sata cards.