Hard Drive

stokecity_m · 19 Apr 2009 at 16:24

looking for a cheapish 1TB hard drive to place all my pictures and videos on.

anyone recommend a good one?

also need alittle advice on installing it.

twitch · 19 Apr 2009 at 16:44

This one and it's on offer atm

stokecity_m · 19 Apr 2009 at 16:53

cheers.

FaceplantSi · 19 Apr 2009 at 16:55

twitch said:
This one and it's on offer atm

+1 Great drive that one.

Installing is very easy - I'm assuming you can do the physical put it in and cable it up bit...? Then in Windows go to Control Panel, Admin Tools, Computer Mgmt, Disk Mgmt. You should now see a screen showing your drives, with the newly installed one at the bottom showing something like "Disk x" and then to the right of that "Unallocated". You need to right click on the "Disk x" bit and then select New Simple Volume I think, then to the right where it says "Unallocated" you can right click and format the drive and select drive letter etc etc.

Once this is done you will see the drive in 'My Computer' and you can start using it.

CaseyChaos · 19 Apr 2009 at 17:04

+1 or if Western digital is more your type of drive then the caviar greens are only £5 more

stokecity_m · 19 Apr 2009 at 19:26

Cheers guys - one thing, as i only want this drive to "store" film and pictures, i take it i will be able to remove it and add it to another computer when i upgrade without losing any data?

twitch · 19 Apr 2009 at 20:28

Yep you should be fine as long as you stick with all current operating systems.

stokecity_m · 19 Apr 2009 at 21:10

how good are external drives? as it might be useful to be able to use the pictures and vids on other computers too.

FaceplantSi · 19 Apr 2009 at 21:21

stokecity_m said:
how good are external drives? as it might be useful to be able to use the pictures and vids on other computers too.

Most external drives are simply std internal drives in a caddy which has a power/data interface built in. The desktop externals tend to be 3.5" drives, so a std internal HDD can be put into a caddy and used as such - or if an external fails power supply or something similar then some have taken it apart and put the drive inside their rig to recover the data. The 'Portable' drives tend to use 2.5" HDD's so capacity and speed tend to be a bit less.

Externals are very good for what they do and make great backup units too, and a lot come with backup software included. Some are pre-formatted so you can plug them in and off you go, but they tend to be FAT32 to maintain maximum compatability but this means you cannot have any single file over 4Gb in size (and with digital video that's easily chewed up) so I would suggest reformatting to NTFS.