External Hard Drives

I got my 300GB off ebay last year, was very cheap for the time. An its served me very well. Very quiet an quick. Sorry, cant remeber the name..

But to check ebay out!
 
gel said:
Offer from Pixmania €99 for 500GB-
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That price from Pixmania is very good. I paid 159.99 Euros for the same 500GB drive from PC World at Airside last month.

I have always used Maxtor or Western Digital external drives both at home and at work with no problems. I have also been lucky when ordering cameras (manuals supplied in French can be replaced with download PDF's) etc from Pixmania and have had no probs

Update: Sat. 11th August:

Today's Irish Times has an ad by PC World for a Maxtor 320GB External Drive (model: MAX320GI) reduced from €119.99 to €99.99!
 
DrMoriarty said:
I recently put something like that together very cheaply by ordering for $29.25 delivered and then separately picking up a 120GB 2.5" drive on eBay for another €50-odd. Works a treat, and you could go for a higher capacity if you wanted to carry around more stuff.
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I was toying with the idea of doing something like this myself but I cannot for the life of me find such enclosures on eBay* for c. US$30 never mind 120GB 2.5" HDs for c. €50. You don't happen to have any links handy by any chance? Any idea what might be the minimum useful HD capacity for this purpose (I know that this is a bit of a how long is a piece of string question...)? I have a few 2.5" and 3.5" HDs knocking around but they may be too small for this purpose...

* Update: I meant "buy it now" rather than messing around with auctions - don't have the patience for that sort of carry on! :)

Update 2: Oh - I just tried a bit more searching and can find items in or around the prices outlined above. Sorry! :eek:
 
Myself and one of the lads in the office (well really him but I showed him the post) got one of those HD media player based on Dr Ms post for around 40e delivered, we took an old 20gb 2.5" out of a laptop that wasnt in use anymore, 5 minutes to seat it into that player and presto a 20gb media player. Works perfectly.
Heres a similar one on [broken link removed] for about 30 sterling delivered.

edit, that media player needs a special usb cable for connecting to an external. A mini-type on one end and a hex-type connector on the other (need to order peats or maplins didnt have them), so as we dont have one we havent tried to read an external while the 2.5" was in situ so dont know if thats possible, ie, you may have to remove the 2.5" if you wanted the player to read an external. Dr M may have more on this.
 
car said:
Dr M may have more on this.
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'Fraid not, as I've (so far) only connected my own either to the PC, to copy files onto it, or to the TV, to play them back. I don't have the player to hand at the moment, but I'll try what you describe later and report back (this may take a few days, as I'm away until the end of the week).
 
car said:
edit, that media player needs a special usb cable for connecting to an external. A mini-type on one end and a hex-type connector on the other
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Can you post a link to details or an image of this cable?
so as we dont have one we havent tried to read an external while the 2.5" was in situ so dont know if thats possible, ie, you may have to remove the 2.5" if you wanted the player to read an external.
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Why would you want to do this?
 
Bought one of these babys to back up my photos etc from my home PC.
  • 120Gb
  • 2.5" & small
  • USB powered, comes with cable, albeit a very short one
  • Backup software (incremental & encrypted)
  • €62.54 + vat
Great little yolk, leave it in the office & every few days, or when I download photos, I back up the data. the backup software is cool, you select what you want to backup, and it highlights favorites & mail files. It only backs up what has changed. Didn't know it had the s/w so that was bonus.
 
Can you post a link to details or an image of this cable?
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From looking at the media player, we figure that this is the cable thats required with the mini type on one end to connect to the player (as seen on some digi cameras) and the hex/square type at the other end to connect to an external HDD. But must stress we're not sure that that mini type connection is correct, if you do get the player, Id bring it into a shop to be sure. Id rang peats and maplins and they said they didnt stock it.

Why would you want to do this?
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If you have the 2.5" drive seated then if you wanted to read any other external drive the 2.5" drive may need to be removed. Again, we're not sure on this but as we dont have the above cable we're unable to test. The cable that comes with it is the mini type on one end and a standard USB on the other for connection to a PC as Dr M describes. This works fine.
 
Ah - you may well need a special USB cable for USB OTG connectivity between two devices without the need for a PC/laptop as opposed to connecting the device to a PC.
 
gel said:
Offer from Pixmania €99 for 500GB-
Click to expand...

Went and got one from Pixmania. Very happy with the product. Only (small) quib was that it took a week & half to arrive. I ordered another product from Komplett on the same night and it arrived within a few days.
 
My P.C. has a 250GB SATA Hard Drive - any recomendations so I could back this up to an External Hard Drive?
 
europhile said:
Can iTunes be backed up to an external hard disk?
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It can be but you will need a backup programme like Superduper since iTunes itself only gives you the option to backup to disc i.e. DVD.

I suppose if you only wanted to backup iTunes and don't want to buy backup software then you could just drag and drop the music folder and the separate library folder that contains your playlists, play count ect. to the external drive.

The advantage of backup software is that most of them will enable you to do incremental backups so that it only copies over the files that have changed since the last backup, this really speeds up the process.
 
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