External hard drive

[Xusia Of Delos]

Being a laptop user, the bane of my life has always been hard disk space.

My current Toshiba shipped with a 60 GB drive which although good by last Octobers standards, quickly got filled.

So I started looking for a cheap solution and settled on an external drive as opposed to replacing the internal unit. Particularly as the space is mainly for mp3's, avi, mpeg's etc.

Well I found today, more through luck than judgement, a Maxtor 160 GB external drive. It connects by USB 2.0 or Firewire.

Now I didn't have either of these on my current laptop, so I purchased a Adaptec PCMCIA card which provided both.

Set up was sorted within 1 minute. Attach, and supply drivers when the "wizard" prompts.

Unbeleiveable, 160 GB. I remember my first 100MB hard drive!

[nathan_silly]

I had a 5MB 5.25" full height hard disk. And 8.25" floppies. And paper punch tape.

Beat that! :)

[Steve Bate]

I got the 250Gb External Maxtor last week, connected via firewire and I cannot believe how fast it is. I was getting loads of dropped frames when capturing some camcorder footage to my internal HD, not one dropped frame f the maxtor with over 3 hours captured!

It's stackable too!

Steve

[JohnG]

I've been looking at these Maxtor external drives as they seem to offer incredible value for money. A couple of questions if I may
1) Are they noisy ?
2) Does the fact that they don't have an on/off switch cause a problem ?

[Xusia Of Delos]

Not particularly noisy. I have mine on the table next to at present and it is making a comparable amount of noise to my laptop.

As the drive is really being used for data storage rather than O/S files, I see no problem with not having an on off switch. They are designed to be hot swappable.

[magking]

I have the 250GB Western Digital and excpet the lights (yes it actually have blue and red light along the sides) it's a dream to work with.
I use it mainly for backup of my 200GB + 60GB internal disks.

[JohnG]

Where did you get the Maxtor from ?

[Madders]

I just upgraded my Apple G3 Powerbook from a 4GB internal drive to an 80GB internal drive :grin: Oh and I've also got an external maxtor 40GB harddrive to keep all the crap/ backups on ;)

Steve

[Xusia Of Delos]

Got 160GB Maxtor form City Acessories (who usually sell at over the odds prices). For a realistic pricing try MISCO or DABS Direct (online).