If your in the US and you need a 500GB External Hard drive, check here. http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/prod...inkid=j13774590k26451&affiliateid=k26451&mid= It's a WD Mybook External 500GB for $71.96 with no rebates! Mods: If I am not allowed to do this please let me know and close.
By all means post these as a recommendation in the PC building thread or something but don't start your own thread.
Alright. I also feel it would be a good idea to bring up a thread about online sales, like cheap online deals for computer parts and all. Do you think that's a good idea?
they probably won't go for it because how can you tell it's a legit new member linking a good cheap item or a spammer linking to their particular shop/site.
That's true. They could only allow stores such as Newegg, TigerDirect, Staples and other reputable online resellers.
wow this deal is great. although im not sure if making a thread with deals is good or not, i happen to be happy that core2kid shows this to us. ive actually been looking for a external hard drive. this seems to be cheaper than buying an internal 500gb HD itself. too good to be true? whys it so cheap?
I don't know why it's so cheap, may be a price mistake. I actually bought one of them from Staples and price matched it with Circuit City's price and staples had no problem with it (besides the fact that they lost $78). All I did was show them a printout of the Circuit City page and they price matched it. So far, I am happy with the performance of the drive. It's been on for 6 hours (continuous transfer, backing up entire HD, 200+250GB so I can combine those and do RAID0 xD) and is only warm to the touch. Edit: If Staples needs a copy of a receipt for proof of price matching, ask me and I'll post an image of my receipt. I paid with cash so nothing to hide, lol.
That's pretty imba, because there's a normal WD drive inside you can nick, and a free USB2 enclosure!
Just letting you guys know that I took mine apart because it was making a wierd sound. See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03FXzfWyFBQ At first I thought it had failed. Actually upon taking it apart the drive was hot as ****!!! I literally could not touch it, I had to let it cool. I was transferring data to it though for 6 hours. When I took it apart I saw that it was a SATA drive. I hooked it up internally into my computer and the noise was gone. I ran read tests using WD Diagnostics and it passed. Then I hooked it up externally with the USB board without putting it in the case and ran the tests and it was fine. It didn't run warm either. My conclusion, The drive gets very hot but if you buy an other enclosure such as http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145656 (but with the SATA internal interface) you should be fine. I'm putting it back into my case because transferring data for 6 hours was something I was only going to do once. Edit: I put it back together and you can't even tell that I took it apart!
External drives typicaly get too hot to hold continuously but not too hot to even touch, they usually run in the low 50s degrees when used continuously. The noise is expected as the more you fill it, the more platters will get used and the noisier it wil get. In cheap plastic surrounds like the Myboo uses, that means rattle. Imba isn't acrnonym, it's short for Imbalanced.
Well, the drive's working for me. One other question I had is that I am trying to make an image of my OS so I can combine my 2 hard drives and do a RAID array. I backed it up with Acronis and the backup came out corrupted. What software do you suppose I should use to create a backup image or how should I go ahead doing the backup that I want?
I've never had any issues with Acronis but you could try Norton Ghost. Just be aware that you shouldn't really use RAID unless it'sfor redundancy. Using RAID for speed gains is a very poor-thought out idea. I used it once a little while back, and it was intolerably slow compared to the single drives before, and there's the problem of if one drive goes, all data is lost.
I was actually going for RAID0, not RAID1. I need the extra space. I was going to do it with Dual 250GB WD Drives. When I did it with my friends comptuer, it worked out fine and I did infact see a speed increase. His was Dual 320s though in Vista. About loosing the Data, I'll continue to monitor the hard drives and my temperatures are always in a tolerable range. I could also make an image of the OS and store it on my 500GB just incase. Only con I see here is that you can't pull the drive out of the system and pop it into another.
If you need the space, don't use RAID at all. The speed increase is good for transfer rate, bad for access time (which is what affects loading windows) - the risks of losing data are too high given that. Loading games took ages as well, it's only copying big files over that it's actually useful for.
I actually couldn't even get a successful backup of my OS drive. What I am doing now is that currently my primary drive is a Maxtor 200GB SATA1. I am cloning that to my WD 250GB SATA 2 drive and doing whatever I feel like with my 200GB. May just keep it for backup or Vista and Halo 2. I have right now 48.2 GB free so add another 50GB and I should be fine.
