I have a friend who keeps buying externals HDs for less than you can buy the 'same' HD without the box. I am been a bit critical before but now he is at his 4th external that died in 6 months I wish to be more critical. I was wondering if you could give me more ammo. I put mine externals together spend an extra $30 on the box and have to pay for the disk. I have never seen any problems with my externals. I always get eSATAs so they are much faster than the USBs. Actually I do have a problem with a new Nextstar. I am looking for the box so I can return it. The computer will not recognise it and the computer will not fully boot if that drive is connected in eSATA mode. Is there anything stuip I could be doing that would cause the disk to be so toxic? What is a good cheap eSATA box?
You do realise that the vast majority of external HDD failures are the enclosure and not the drive itself? Why not just take the HDDs out of the broken boxes and put them in something like the NexStars you use on a regular basis?
No! Not a clue. I will call him up before he throws it out. Thanks! Being cheap and curious I would have checked that out if it happened to me.
For the eSATA issue, you may want to look at your BIOS settings and look at the boot order for your HDDs. Make sure the one with your OS installed is in the top of the list. I ran into a similar issue when one of my 3 internal SATA drives became unplugged and shutdown my PC. Long story there, but the data end broke off my WD 500 GB drive so I had to superglue it back on lol. After I plugged it back in the computer wouldn't boot up so I looked in the BIOS and somehow the order was changed /shrug.
I have my BIOS booting from CD then C:. Plus, I am the one with the eSATAs and I have no problem. My friend was having problems with the life of cheap externals.
