Considering a high-cap external HD.

[wctyler]

A friend of mine managed to get a new external USB HD with a Maxtor 200gig 8mb buffer drive. I like the idea and I'm going to get him to show me where he got it so I can order one if I decide on it. I'm thinking that it'll work well for me as my PC is getting full (with RAID and all), and it seems cost effective.

How fast is data access on such a drive compared to an internal ATA100 drive? Any reliability problems? Anything I should know about them? I want to use it to keep my data on, primarily downloaded stuff. Now that I have a DVD burner and Bit Torrent, I've found my measly 40gig main drive array is getting rather full.

[thegladiatorgy]

Here are two links with some useful info on them.


http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030915/index.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031218/index.html

[jinsta]

Hey,

I was looking into doing something similar to that myself. I am leaning towards just setting up an addition box rather than an external drive. With the seperate box, you can have it connected to your home network, being more easily accessed by other computers. Its also handy because you can set up an file-server on the box, so you can access them from alternate locations.

Just an idea. Let me know how that external drive works out for you, if you do it. I might change my mind to that myself.



~jinsta