External hard drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter bmiller
  • Start date Start date
B

bmiller

I have been playing around with windows movie maker, with
the intention of making some home DVD's. However I'm
finding out my 40 GB hard drive is going to be too small
to capture avi formatted video. So I'm thinking about an
external hard drive, but don't know anything about them.
Are they plug and play, will XP have any problems running
them, any brand/type to look for? Thank you, Bill.
 
Hey Bill,

Yes, they are plug and play. I actually recently purchased a 120 gig
external hdd from coolerexpress.com, and am very satisfied. Go to
pricewatch.com to start your search. What you are going to be looking for
is physical size (a 3.5 inch drive or 2.5 inch, but with the enclosure it
will be larger. My 3.5 inch drive is almost 5 inches wide and 8 inches
long, 1.5 tall. A 2.5inch hdd will naturally have a smaller enclosure,
however the general rule is they are slower than the larger ones (unless
you're willing to spend boo-coo bucks.) Next thing is interface. Either
Firewire (ieee1394) or USB 2.0 will be your choices. I recommend firewire
if you've got it (my laptop does natively) but USB 2.0 is a little faster.
You're limited by the actual hard drive speed anyways Firewire will do
400MB/s, but the ATA/133 interface for my HDD will only pull 133MB/s. If
you has USB on your computer, make sure it's 2.0 before you purchase, or
else you'll be sadly disappointed as the original USB is 1/40th the speed of
2.0. You can buy addon USB2.0 or Firewire cards if you don't have either
interface.

For me having both interfaces was important, as my laptop has Firewire and
the original USB, but most places I would bring it to will most likely have
USB of some form. Be sure to differentiate the HD brand and the brand of
enclosure. For instance, my external enclosure will support any hard drive
up to 300gig. I chose an IBM, but I could have just as easily gone with a
Western Digital. Compare RPM, Access Time, and on board cache to get a
general idea which HD is better for you.

-James
 
bmiller said:
I have been playing around with windows movie maker, with
the intention of making some home DVD's. However I'm
finding out my 40 GB hard drive is going to be too small
to capture avi formatted video. So I'm thinking about an
external hard drive, but don't know anything about them.
Are they plug and play, will XP have any problems running
them, any brand/type to look for? Thank you, Bill.
Click to expand...

Hi Bill,

I can't recommend any particular brands (mine's a generic one I bought at a
computer fair, and works fine) but here's some advice.
Check whether your PC has USB2.0 High-Speed ports. These are found on most
PC motherboards made within the last 12-18 months or so. They support a data
rate of 480Mbit/sec, which is plenty fast enough for a hard disk.
However, the older USB 1.1 ports (PCs made between 1996-ish and early 2002)
support only 12Mbit/sec. I don't recommend connecting an external drive that
way, because it's too slow.
If you only have USB1.1, then you have two solutions for an external hard
disk:
1) buy an external disk that has a Firewire (aka iLink, aka 1394) interface,
and get a 1394 adapter card for your PC, or
2) buy a USB2.0 hard disk and a separate PCI USB2.0 interface card. They're
not expensive.

1394 is another high-speed interface, an alternative to USB2.0, but it's not
commonly found on PCs. The drive I have offers both USB2.0 and 1394
connectivity, which makes it very flexible. Also worth mentioning is that
USB2.0 is backwards compatible, so if you plug a USB2.0 drive into a USB1.1
port it should still work - just very slowly.

In answer to your other question - almost all external drives, whether USB2
or 1394, are plug-and-play and supported natively by Windows. You can't boot
Windows XP from an external drive (or at least if you can, I haven't found
out how) but that's about the only restriction. On most recent motherboards,
you can boot into DOS from an external drive, which can be handy for system
recovery purposes.

Rather than buy an external case with a drive built in, it's often cheaper -
and more flexible - to buy an external drive case that accepts standard 3.5"
ATA/100 drives and then purchase your preferred size/type of drive
separately. That's what I did - I paid about $50 for the case, and slung an
old 30GB drive into it, and it works quite acceptably.

I hope this helps..
 
Yes you can get external drives which leverage your PCs 1394 or USB port.

I would recommend you get a dual port supported device which will provide
your external case (Pyro makes a good product). then just get the best drive
size*price you can get. Generally you get a better deal doing it that way
vs. buying an already integrated solution.

Also if you are intending to do external media encoding/transcoding, you
really want 1394 and minimally USB2.0 certified devices. USB 1.x will be
too slow or cause havoc with your media streams.
 
Back
Top