Internals are easy. They actually have good reviews. Not to mention, there's only 2-10 worth buying, depending on your needs (storage or speed). With the advent of web 2.0 and external drives, the market has been flooded with so much stuff, it's hard to tell what's good anymore, and reviewers can't possibly get them all. Most of them say "yeah so I got this drive and it's good and fast" in two pages, and offer no transfer rates/data. Can some techies tell me their experience with externals?

So then, here's my categories, feel free to add your own, and rank them in order of imptorance:
Price/GB - obviously the cheaper the better.
Reliability - I doubt it will die within 3 years, but I don't think I want another deathstar.
Speed - I may mod my case for an eSATA port, since USB 2.0 is actually worse than firewire 400 (I have both of these). However, it's all about backup, and ideally this is where all my torrantz would go.
Type - So there's the cheap premade ones, like the WD my book, or I can get my own WD Green drive and an enclosure, or I can grab one of those hot-swap n64-like docks.
Physical Size - This is my call, since having a slim external would be nice for travel, but I think I want a TB drive.

As for the enclosures: I currently have 2 Deathstars 160 GB in a Raid 0 and an aging Seagate Barracuda 320 GB. That means maybe I could get a better internal and use one of these as the external, but then I have a rather small external.

Its been my experience that companies always put their lowest end drives in their enclosures.

Its best to buy the drive and enclosure separate and put them together yourself. ESATA is a lot faster than USB but not everyone has an ESATA port. Firewire sometimes has a slight edge on USB.

My advice is as such: Get a Caviar Blue or Green since they are more about long lasting than performance and this is a storage drive. Something in 5400RPM might be nice since the slower speeds keeps heat down and leads to longer drive life. Since it'll be handling large files, 16 or 32mb cache is recommended. I'm sure you can pick something out in this department.

Edit: 1TB, 64MB Cache 70$ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490

So that leaves us with the actual enclosure. Since I like active cooling on everything I use this would be my recommendation. It has a fan, good ratings, USB2.0 and ESATA. You really can't go wrong.
Edit: I see that the enclosure I recommended comes with an ESATA add-in card. Score!

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 21 2010, 9:21 pm by Excalibur.

Mega score! Except for those stupid LEDs.

I was under the impression that the difference in 16 MB cache and 32 MB was minimal (and I didn't know they even made 8 MB caches anymore).

Also, Hard drives don't strike me as something that desperately needs cooling (granted I have 2 giant fans blowing on them all the time to keep it cool), especially something like a 5400 RPM drive.

Sigh, I'm going to feel bad wasting a drive which is actually significantly faster than my barracuda in an external. Either way, I was looking to cost my dad $100 on a drive. Maybe I'll see if my brother can buy the enclosure.

However, when I see something like this it makes me wonder if the pomp is worth $45. (the seagate inside is no slouch).

As I said, pre-assembled usually use shit drives.

I noticed since I'm running my rigg as an open bench rather than in a case right now, my drives all got VERY hot till I laid a fan on them (A 140mm pretty much covers them side by side.). Maybe its just because they're 7200RPM but they were quite warm. And the ambient temp here in the basement is like 55F.

I think I'm going to move my computer and bed down to the basement... It's fucking 80 up in here.

Thanks Ex as always. Still looking for other opinions on the matter though from the people who may own an external which they really (dis)like.

Okay, holy crap:
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?p=29653672

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 22 2010, 1:35 am by rockz.

I would also go with an internal drive with a external enclosure. My case has usb ports and a fan on top, so I just put it over the fan on a little stand of made of whatever, it's quite nice.

Whatever you do, DO NOT get Western Digitals new MyBook 2.0 line. The old mybooks were great. The new ones come with a fixed partition on the drive that appears as a CD-rom drive in windows, that contains their special backup software called SmartWare. The CD image takes up 650 megs on the hard drive, and there is *no way to permanently remove it*. The software itself is on a separate partition on the hard drive, which is just a regular hard drive, but there is firmware inside the enclosure itself that tells it to look for a CD image at that area of the drive. You can take the drive out of the enclosure, plug it in via SATA to your motherboard and format it, but when you put it back into the enclosure, it'll try and run the CD image from that section of the drive (which is now gone), but it will never let you access that space directly. Western Digital have put out and update that lets you disable the smartware, but this does not recover the space for you, instead it simply 'hides' the image from showing up.

What's worse is that the backup software has variously been described as extremely resource hungry, and many report that it just plain doesn't work - it takes a long time to do a backup, and doesn't always get all of the files. After a few times, some people have had it stop working. Many people have been unable to get their files back off the drive. There is a password/encryption feature, where if you forget your password, you are permanently locked out of your files (although this would likely be controlled by the firmware, so if you'd only set a password, connecting directly via SATA should give you access - no such luck if you encrypted it though).

Note that not all WD drives have this "SmartWare", check this chart here: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=8 - the elements drive in particular is a good one to get.

Ended up buying what Ex suggested, though the caviar green was $60 instead of $70. I can't remember if the enclosure was less than $35.

Ex, be glad you're required to pay tax on Newegg orders. States need to unify their sales tax so that they can charge (because I have to pay taxes on this order, but not until April 15 of next year, and by that time I'll forget. Let's hope I don't get audited).

Glad I could be of help. Let me know how it all works out as I may be interested in an external setup similar to this one. Though I may just go straight to an NAS.

Should be here by friday.

Edit:
FML
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173042
is $25 now.

Also, $30 for an Antec 300 is not bad at all.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 9 2010, 6:51 pm by rockz.

Got it set up, however I'm using it on XP for a the time being, so IDK what the 4k sector problem will be like. Formatted to ntfs and it seems to be faster than my RAID 0, so I'm going to think about getting a spinpoint f3 soon and giving away my existing hard drives to other family members or a northwood file server/seedbox.