Seagate hard drives

[frank]

Thinking of getting a 500gb Seagate FreeAgent external HD, anyone using the sata or firewire version of these, How do they perform noisewise ? I seen one of these being demonstrated in a store when they first came out, looked impressive.

I have a 250gb sata internal drive but I suspect it will fill up quite soon when the better weather comes in. I have a onboard firewire connector at the rear of the computer, it would save having to put a extra sata connector in.

 

[crocodile]

Buying an external drive for storage expansion is a really bad idea unless you're going to buy two. One for storage & one for backup.

Even then a more robust (& slightly more expensive) option is to buy bare drives & separate enclosures. That way if either the drive or enclosure fails you have options other than returning the whole thing to the manufacturer.

 

[frank]

I know you can never have enough storage space but where do you draw the line on the amount of hd's, especially when it's just a home user, understandable if your running a business. I can store a lot of photos & files on the ext hd but my next backup from the ext hd would eventually be onto dvd. Should I have a backup for the 2nd backup and so on.

I don't think it's a bad idea as it is also a backup to important stuff on the internal drive, if the internal drive goes belly up then at least I've still got the important stuff on the ext hd and vice versa except for the os which is not a problem to restore.