Extra Hard Drive Advice

almostaskier

Active member
So i want to get an extra hard drive, just to up my memory space. Nothing too drastic, 100 or so GB would do the trick.

I would like to know from the techies here what brands are good, or what i should be looking for in specs to know it is good quality.

Also, once you have hooked up a new hard drive, will the computer flash warnings of low disk space if one of them is filled up, or will it recognise the added room. Also, will it then matter where things are saved for them to function, or is it the same?

Any knowledge on the matter would be greatly appreciated.
 
I got Maxtor one touch 111 300 gb

it has usb & firewire capabilities (faster transfer)

it was on sale at Costco for $160 cdn

IT SEEMS GOOD TO ME

 
I also have that one, I have had no problem with it. And I have a more portable 80gb lacie harddrive, which is good. I would recommend to get a firewire compatible harddrive if you are transfer large files. But just look around and wait for a sale.
 
They will attach by a usb or firewire, then it is just another place you can save it in the computer will not think of it as an addition to it Hard drive just a new place to save it in.
 
if you're adding another hard drive, you'll see them in windows as 2 separate drives like a C drive and an E drive, you'll still get warnings that either drive is full if it is indeed full. You can now use one drive for programs, and the other just for storage.

You could make the 2 drives into 1 effectively via RAID, but that's best to do if they're identical hard drives. So, don't worry about it.

Maxtor and Seagate are the big guys, and make quality stuff. You should alsk know whether or not you want to buy a SATA hard drive or an IDE hard drive. If you don't know the difference, look at the cable that your present hard drive is connected to

SATA:
SATA-Signal-Cable-1.jpg


IDE:
ide.jpg


SATA is newer and a lot faster.

And you should also check on your motherboard to make sure it supports multiple hard drives. (some of the less expensive ones don't)

Look to spend about $100+ for 300GB+

 
i have a maxtor 200gb, works great but make sure you have usb2 or firewire, or it will be slow as hell for mass file transfer
 
Get an SATA, install the operating system on the original hardrive, and all your programs on the newer, bigger hardrive.

although I thought one of the advantages with SATA is that processing is evenly distributed?
 
Because i have so much junk depending on the location of everything, i think that whatever is on this hard drive will stay there, with not too much moving around. The other drive will be used to house pictures, movies, music etc.

Thanks for the help.
 
dont go for the cheapest one. go for quality even if it might cost you. I bought two cheap externals and they both sucked and i always had problems. invest in a legit one
 
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