both are external hard drives. I'd rather have a portable but oh well. There is an $8 difference in price so that is negligible. the WD http://www.samsclub.com/shopping/navigate.do?dest=5&item=440864&pCatg=5795 the Seagate http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Seagate...lack/9238121.p?id=1218065495073&skuId=9238121 does anyone know if what format these drives are in? FAT-32 or NTFS Which do you suggest I purchase?
Why going external rather then internal? The drives should come either unformatted or in NTFS. Either way, it doesnt matter. The file system relies on the OS. Through your OS you can format the drive. I would go for WD personally.
That isn't the best external seagate...it has poor cooling, and seagates need good cooling...otherwise they start clicking. That is possibly the worse WD external...the drive itself is usualy OK, but the the enclosure is total trash...expect random disconnects and short life. Both of these drives can be formated to either NTFS or FAT32...although you will not be able to format FAT32 with the windows format tool.
I have had a WD MyBook for quite awhile now with out any problems. I think mines a 350 GB. Actually you can format to FAT32, just cant run windows off it.
To clarify, you should use NTFS if you intend to only use the drive with Windows systems. If you intend to ever use the enclosure with a Mac, you must use FAT32. Windows and Linux can read either, but Macs will not read NTFS.
sorry, been busy I'm gonna go ahead and get the WD. I like the idea of being able to change the hard drive on my own, something the seagate doesn't make easy. Hopefully the enclosure will hold up. As for why get an external instead of an internal. I need to transfer a lot of data between a few machines. My 2 desktops and my 2 laptops. All PCs, so NTFS for me.
Personally, I just buy the drive and enclosure separately. The initial outlay can be slightly more expensive, but you know exactly where you stand should the enclosure break.
I've had three of the WD My Books and I was fortunate to get them all with three-year warranties. One of them went out after about a year and a half and WD swapped it out in about a week's time. The other two are still backing up a couple family DVRs. The cases are not designed for rough environments. If you are going to bounce them around in the back-seat of a car you might want better enclosures or carry them in a padded case. Dick
What makes you think its easy to swap out the drives in the WD case? Thats far from the truth. If there large files build your own like Sam said and go for one with firewire connection as it is much faster then USB 2.0
Not necessarily, but Firewire can provide an increase. If you really wanted decent performance from an external though you would buy a USB3 controller card and a USB3 enclosure - not cheap, a USB2 enclosure on its own will be £20 or so, whereas a USB3 card plus the enclosure will be more like £75 in total (At the moment, this will inevitably drop). Last I checked, Firewire800 (important, else there's no gain over USB2) enclosures were £30-£35.
i didn't even know we were up to USB3. and Firewire is no good for me. My laptops have it but neither of my desktops do.
Most desktop motherboards have firewire headers, which you can attach expansion brackets to in order to get rear firewire ports. Assuming you have the header on your motherboard, it's very cheap and simple to install them.
But is USB3 any good? Last I heard it wasnt supported natively, so I assumed it was plagued with bugs for the time being. Admittedly I didnt look into it to much when I was reading up on it.
lol it struck me odd as well. I dismissed it at the time with the intent to research it later on. Based on a quick google: http://www.i4u.com/article27956.html It seems it wasnt reaching its full potential from the sounds of it.
They can say that because for reasons I don't quite understand, despite using identical chipsets, Asus' USB3 chipset is faster than Sharkoon's. Bizarre. I've not seen Gigabyte's performance-tested yet. The speed of USB3 however, requires funny things be done with the PCI express bus, which is likely fine for X58s, but for P55s does interfere with graphics performance, unless you limit the speed of the controllers. (I believe this is due to the fact that the S-ATA3 and USB3 controller share a PCI express 1x lane, only 500MB/s, yet two USB3 and two S-ATA3 ports combined would use 2.2GB/s if all at max speed, so there is a switching mode to let them have 4x PCIe bandwidth, or something to that effect)
