Be Excellent To Each Other

Need a decent external HDD to travel around with - main criteria is

it has to plug into and work with an Eee PC (aka Linux compatible, although I *may* have Windows on it)
Durable
Can survive being carried through airport metal detectors and all that.

Does this fit the bill, d'ya think?

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=277261&Tab=11&NoMapp=0

Should be fine. I got a little thing from Ebuyer, can't remember who makes it. As with all external drives, keep a backup. Fancy rubber coating or not, it's still a hard drive.

i have an Western digital mybook and so far i'm satisfied

The MyBook is 14cm x 18cm x 6cm.

The Freecom is 14cm x 8 x 1.9cm. Better for travelling, I think.

In addition the Mybook may well need an external power supply.

I have a Mybook on the edit suite (on firewire). It's good. The mini USB dribe I have is a Formac as well as a cheapie Sumovision case I put a old laptop HD in for about a fiver.

Waking up this nearly 11 year old thread!

I’d like an external hard drive for backup storage of documents and photos, etc. I am thinking (though am willing to be taught better if I am wrong) that a solid state drive would be best as lack of moving parts = less liable to be messed up/worn down (?). Also, aren’t they zippier?

I know I’m looking about £100+ but obviously the less I have to spend on hard drives, the more I have to spend on things like Play Doh and crayons.

Cheers, anyone with info/recommendation.

How much space do you need? Solid State Drives are indeed faster, but if it's just for backup use then speed isn't really a huge concern. You'll get a lot more space for your buck with a normal hard drive.

These are good 1TB drives

I may have an "old" 4TB drive (USB 3.0) that I don't need any more, if that's of any interest? Wouldn't want any money for it though. It's only a few years old so it should still have a good bit of life left in it yet. Pretty sure I've got a 1TB jobber kicking around somewhere too.

Yeah, to echo was GazChap says I wouldn't worry about getting an SSD just for a backup drive. Normal drives are plenty quick enough for that and much cheaper.

Is this just for backup or are you looking to clear the files off your computer to save some space too? If you plan to keep the stuff locally, have you thought about just putting them one of the various cloud storage things like OneDrive, Dropbox etc?

Thanks all,

It's for backup. I do have a (completely full) Dropbox and files in a few other places. All of my photos are on Flickr, etc, and though I also have them stored on my laptop the recent changes Fickr made did just serve to remind me that the cloud services we rely on are subject to so many things beyond our control that I just want a second, locally backed up option. Russell had an old I think 500GB external hard drive, but I thought I'd get myself something new only because I've had a backup hard drive fail on me before that had been given to me and I could never get my stuff back off it as it corrupted loads of my files, and it was at the same time I never had the laptop I'd been working on, and I lost a heap of files and work. I think that's why I'd initially thought of the solid state as I thought it would be less liable to corrupting files in storage. My Macbook is six years old (today! Happy birthday, Macbook!) and as my last one actually exploded... If I could get a second hand one that I wasn't nervous about losing things on (I know there are no guarantees, and it was just bad luck/circumstance last time) then again I am absolutely going to take it that there are people here that know far, far better than me.

It says I'm using about 350GB of the storage, but a lot of that will be system files, so it doesn't have to be hugely huge

This one will do you just fine:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-Expans ... 139&sr=8-3

I use those Seagate ones too. They’re fine, but don’t feel very robust. I’m sure I’ve dropped one a couple of times and worried about it (they’ve still worked, mind) so handle with care!

If you want a shock-proof one then they do exist, but they're more expensive.

"Don't drop electrical items" is the advice here

Sage advice. It’s worth mentioning though cause you might move them around a lot and I wouldn’t want Mimi to lose her stuff if she’s as clumsy as I am.

EDIT: or you store them somewhere and put stuff on top of them by accident. I worry about that too. Maybe get a case for them. I shove mine in my Switch hard case thing now.

I have a couple of those and I keep them in the box they came in.

I am, in general, not very clumsy at all. However I do have a toddler, and more importantly a Russell, and Russell is the clumsiest person that ever there was.

I'm so clumsy I have this.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07 ... UTF8&psc=1

Do note, there's no drive in it. Then I fitted a 200gb SSD because it doesn't have moving parts. Obviously it's a lot less space but it's more than enough to carry all of my favourite albums ripped from CD to WAV. It's very robust and nicely made, though will cost you far more per gb than any mech drive.

Thank you for all the A’s I e and links. I’ve handed the job of making decisions to Russell as I ended up more confused than I started

Got that drive. Thanks all