looking for an external hard drive

my_computer · 8 Apr 2008 at 14:41

For my course at university i'm in need of an external hard drive for the video editing work i am doing. therefore i am looking for a drive of no less than 500GB. i would also like to use the drive more generally to store my music files. i've been told i need one with quite a high 'spindle speed'. can anyone reccomened one thats not too expensive

rpstewart · 8 Apr 2008 at 15:09

At 500Gb you won't get a choice of spindle speed, 7200rpm is all that is available at that size.

Do you know what interface you need, generally USB is the most compatible but also the slowest, ideally you want eSATA but then you need an eSATA port on the machine it needs to connect to. Are you looking for a pre-built unit or are you happy to fit a bare drive into a caddy yourself?

Remember anything that's 500Gb will be a 3.5" disk and hence needs an external power brick so they're not that portable.

jbloggs · 8 Apr 2008 at 15:14

This + This...?

Green-Peace · 8 Apr 2008 at 15:21

jbloggs said:
This + This...?

Agree with making your own as most ready-built externals come with crippled warrantys. However I would use a seagate HD as they all come with 5 years warranty.
Also if you intend on moving it about loads then I would personally look at 2.5" HD's and cases (cheap as £8 delivered on flea-bay). These are far better as they are much smaller, robust and do not need bulky PSU's for juice.

bledd · 8 Apr 2008 at 15:31

if you're not using eSATA, there's no point getting a 7200rpm drive

icyboxes have the best build quality, if your pc has eSATA, then get one of the 360 or 361 models (not sure if ocuk sells them), along with a nice quiest Samsung hd

remember, if you buy a 500gb hard drive, the ammount of space on it is around 460Gb

-edit, or a firewire one, if you're doing video editing, very likely to have firewire, it's faster than usb2 at transferring files i think..

Green-Peace · 8 Apr 2008 at 17:08

bledd. said:
if you're not using eSATA, there's no point getting a 7200rpm drive

Of course their is, have you not heard of access time :confused:

I have loads of 5200RPM and 7200RPM external drives and all are connected via USB2. The 7.2k ones are far quicker and snappier/nicer to use than the slower 5.2k ones!

Personally if you go 3.5" then I would opt for a decent external case that has both USB2 and eSATA so that it's got the best of both worlds. ie performance and compatibility.