I am looking into buying an external harddrive. I will use it mostly for music, but I might put some videos on there too. I can get a Maxtor One touch 4 for $80 or a Western Digital My Book Office for $140, both are 500GB. Is one better than the other? The specs on the two seem to be the same, but I dont know about reliabily on either of them. I would like to save some money if I could, but I really dont want to worry about losing my files because I bought a junk harddrive. Any help would be great.
Neither of them are bad. I prefer WD hard drives to Maxtors, but then the price tag for that Mybook is far more than you should be paying. The best way to make an external drive is to buy a normal internal PC hard drive and put it in your own enclosure. The assembly process is simple. I usually recommend the Western Digital WD5000AAKS and the IcyBox IB-351 enclosure.
Hi, I bought a 500 GB western digital for $99 at best buy from blackfriday. Hehe, I went at 10am the whole shelf was gone but notice some hidden behind some other boxes and got one of the last 3. Anyways I want to know if theres any free programs or stuff that would encrypt my files or hdd since the programs on the my book is just a trial and it sucks. Also is fat32 good or should i reformat to ntfs. What is the difference? I really need a external hard drive i had a 80GB for 3 years with only 8gb free space lol.
FAT32 is complete trash to be honest. I'm amazed WD still format MyBooks using it. Backup your data and reformat it with NTFS. As for encrypting files, I trialled AxCrypt once, seemed ok. I don't often encrypt any of my files though, so I don't have much experience in that area.
