External hard Drives

Are they any good.. The only good part of them is that you can bring them everywhere.. Anyone have any experience with them?

why would you want one? and how to they connect?

Probably use a SCSI cable. Why don't you just get a ZIP drive or something along those lines?

No I was just wondering.. Plus, this one connects thru USB.

how fast is USB?

Wonder that too...

PLease read the sticky at the top of this forum. Only reply if you know the answer please.

Originally posted by Jan
PLease read the sticky at the top of this forum. Only reply if you know the answer please. So DCI can't reply to his own thread?

Anyway I think it should be slower than internal HDDs.

My experience with a Buslink one wasn't good. In theory it works great, and sometimes it did (sometimes being the operative word). It worked long enough that I was able to download everything off my laptop to it and transfer it to my new desktop.

The problems were that it the drive often wasn't available (error when you tried to click on the drive via winexplorer to browse it), and also copying files to it failed often.

Overall, it was good enough to get the files over, but not good enough to actually use everyday as a second drive.

This could have been a buslink driver problem, I haven't used all of them. Maybe there is a review site for the various different models and makes.

There are a bit slow. So don't use them.

Thanks Chicken.. That helped alot.. I wont be buying it.

External USB Drives are a good choice for server administrators or people who administrate large number of computers (i.e. college network administrator). You can have all the needed program setups (office xp, norton system works, and so on). THis way, they can take the setup programs anywhere they need to go, hook it up, install the program and continue their work. Instead of carrying the individual cds.

Originally posted by Robert
External USB Drives are a good choice for server administrators or people who administrate large number of computers (i.e. college network administrator). You can have all the needed program setups (office xp, norton system works, and so on). THis way, they can take the setup programs anywhere they need to go, hook it up, install the program and continue their work. Instead of carrying the individual cds. thats a good idea. Is it faster than using CDs and copy everything?

Well being USB, plug and play. Assuming the computer has a USB Port. It's faster because you do not need to continue to switch Cds. Most programs (like norton) can be installed from the hard drive and not using a cd (just copy the setup files to the external hard drive). But the external hard drives are also good for everyday usage for example, you got a laptop and a home computer. You're a business man. You travel a lot. But you don't wanna install all those needed programs (like AOL) on your nice new fast laptop. But you want to use AOL when on the road, install those programs on your external hard drive and take it with you. The HPs are the best I've seen.

External hard drives can be faster or slower, if I were to get one I would ONLY get firewire or USB 2.0 as for scsi, that is just not worth the price. And for usb That is too stinking slow! Although chances are you can't take them everywhere a lot of times they require drivers, and you can't install stuff on it and then go somewhere else with it because it won't be in the registry and the other computer won't recognize it properly.

What they are useful for is:
Working at home and the office
Recording audio :) (they have external hard drives for this)