I need help buying an external hard drive. I'm looking at 1 TB hard drives. I'm deciding between these two models. Please tell me which model is a better buy or recommend a different model. Choice 1 Choice 2
Amazon is garbage for comparing different models, Newegg would be better. If you don't have a Mac, I would go with choice one. I have the same hdd in the 320 GB variety, and it works well.
I'd wager that it's the same drive in both of them. It doesn't matter which one you get. They are probably just branded differently.
Something to consider, however, is that nether of those have e-sata (afaik). You are going to be transferring files using USB2.0, which is slow as all fuck.
If your machine has an E-sata port, do yourself a favor and get a drive that has e-sata. It's several times faster. I recently got a 1TB 'Fantom' hdd, which was ~110 USD, and has e-sata as well as USB 2.0. If you are interested/have an e-sata port on your machine, I can go and find the exact model I got for you.
@Wolverine: There is 1 way, and that is to stick the drive into the machine itself (aka, not external). Although if you only have Firewire and USB 2.0, you are probably on a Mac, in which case that is a bit harder. Do you have a Mac Pro? Adding drives in that thing is really easy.
If you have a Macbook or an iMac, one route is to buy a drive enclosure, move your current drive (in that machine) into the enclosure, and stick an internal in your current machine (although I don't think they make 1TB laptop drives).
If that doesn't sound like fun, then just ignore my comments about USB 2.0 being slow, and get one of those WD drives. :-] If you've never used e-sata, then you won't notice a difference.
Im in the same situation as the original post, looking to get a new external HD. I have a Macbook Pro and was wondering if adding the drive means just placing it in the express port on the side or if there is some technical installation into the hardware. I'd definitely like to go the e-sata route but was just curious.
That is exactly what you need. It will allow you to use e-sata.
Beyond that, an external drive is just plug-and-play. You will need to buy an e-sata cable too (unless it comes with it, which it usually doesn't). HOWEVER, you will probably need to reformat your drive. Most external drives ship pre-formatted with FAT32, which is rubbish. Reformat it to HFS+ using Disk Utility, and you are good to go.
@KennyPowers: Just a note- if you want your drive to work with Windows computers as well, HFS+ will not work, Windoze can't read it. You will need to use NTFS or FAT32.
Now, FAT32 sucks because it has an individual file size limitation of ~4 GB. NTFS doesn't have this problem, but isn't natively writable by OSX. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, either a) Have 2 partitions, one for Windows and one for Mac b) Get the NTFS-3g driver for Mac.
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