Hey everyone so I am finally ditching my desktop next week, I finally broke down and got my first laptop should be here early next week. anyways right now i have two drives in my PC that add up to 570 GB (320 and 250) the laptop comes with a 200gig hard drive which is more than enough for me to store my music, games, apps etc. I want to purchase a 750gb-1tb hard drive to store all my other media files (all of R2K's clips, tv shows, movies etc) my PC unlike RAID's monster hasnt been upgraded in about 4 years really so I haven't really kept up with trends with pricing when it comes to hard drives. Whats the brand to go for? I usually purchased WD in the past, should I stick with them. Whats a good price range for 750-1TB? I saw on newegg some prices but they seem to out of stock on a few models I wanted.--looking for 7200RPM/32mb cache I was going to pop it into a sata enclosure I had OR should I buy an external hard drive straight up? I know its cheaper to get an internal and buy an enclosure (in my case I already have one), but what benefits outside of the "auto-backup" software would I get from buying an external drive? any suggestions to what I should do? I dont know if I should even buy such a large hard drive, my worry is that buying a large HD would be risky and that I may be better served going with two smaller drives/enclosures. thanks for the help.
Just shop for a sale. I'd hit Fry's and Best Buy. Drive speed doesn't matter because you're going to be going over USB2 more than likely.
I was in the same situation a while ago. I ended up just buying an external enclosure and taking the internals out of my old computer. Its really pretty easy, if you haven't done it before. Cost me about 30 bucks each. It's also going to be more reliable to put an internal HDD in an external enclosure.
yeah I was wanting to do that but i dont really want to have two enclosures with my two internals right now, but i dont know how good/stable these larger capacity (750gb+) drives are.
I recently built myself a new machine about a month ago. I got a couple of these WD 7200 RPM/32 MB Cache SATA drives. They absolutely scream and I highly recommend them. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320
I picked this WD up a couple of weeks ago, works great: http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1235614962&sr=8-2 I would have preferred a Seagate drive due to their drives coming with a 5 year warranty compared to the WD 1 year, but ended up going the WD route because I liked the simplicity of the case and the single light in the back.
I like acomdata. You can get it in Fry's. Don't know if they make 1TB hard drive though. --- Looks like they do. Compared with other major brand, acomdata is cheaper but more reliable IMO. I don't like WD or Seagate, casing feels cheap, charges more for less quality. I have like 4 acomdata drives. Love them so far. Also the company is in city of industry or somewhere closeby, I know you are in L.A, so one more reason to support local economy.
Don't go for the internal+encolusre. Noisy as hell. Not worth the money you save. External HD are so cheap these days anyway. I say buy two 500GB instead of one 1TB, because like you say you have more safeguards by having two instead of one if it is going to break down. Also it gives you flexibility if you want to do RAID or imaging.
