To go external or internal

Gamefreak501 · 20 Mar 2006 at 19:34

Hi everyone,

When I go out with my camera, I tend to fill up my memory card, come back home, chuck all the contents of my memory card onto my hard drive and then clear my memory card for next time.

I have an 80gb (well, 74.5gb really) which is about 3/4 full up, with everything - games, work, photos, the works.

I am looking to get a second hard drive which will act as a backup for my pictures and any important work I want to keep hold of.

However, I am leaning more towards an external, non-USB hard drive, so if my motherboard decides to kill itself, and anything connected to it, I'll at least have that backup of my important things.

It hasn't happened to me yet, but well, you never know.

The only trouble is, I have a Asus K8V, so I don't have a fast interface (like a firewire port) but I do have a number of PCI slots free which perhaps I could use for a firewire controller.

All help greatly appreciated!

Gamefreak501 · 20 Mar 2006 at 21:02

I am not sure about getting a USB 2.0 drive because the interface may tie up the CPU, although I am thinking of spending about £100-£200 on a firewire controller and the external drive. I still need to get an additional hard drive too, because my 74.5gb hard drive is getting full up!

At the moment, I backup my important stuff on DVD-R discs, but for additional protection, I would like to buy an additional, and more 'accessible' and quicker backup solution like an external hard drive.

Cheers for the help so far!

Gamefreak501 · 20 Mar 2006 at 21:37

I'm thinking of ordering this lot:

Akasa 3.5" Black External Enclosure (£26 OcUK)

2x 200GB ATA-100 Western Digital Caviar (£58 x 2 OcuK)

Making that all about £142.

I'll be using one hard drive as my external backup and one for my internal stuff as my 74.5gb is getting a little small now!

How does that lot sound?

Cheers for the help so far!

Gamefreak501 · 20 Mar 2006 at 22:00

Mujja said:
Sounds good, might as well get one more external enclosure to put you 80GB drive to some use.

Or keep your 80GB in your case and use the 2x200GB as backup drives. Synch the data that is irreplaceable across the 2 external drives. I use SyncBack (freeware).

Cheers Mujja,

I think I'll get a second enclosure for the 80gb hard drive

Or I may sell it and get a third 200GB hard drive and synch the data on it