Hard Disk
What is the most important criteria in choosing external hard disk?
I'm planning to buy an external hard disk, but I'm not sure what is the criteria that should be put into consideration when buying one. Can anybody please give me recommended features for a good external hard disk? If possible, please suggest a model.. Thanks in advance guys!
P/S: I'd like to have the external with capacity of 320GB @ 500 GB.
The only important criteria is compatibility.
Is it compatible with your Operating System, most new external enclosures are compatible back to Windows98 and it is up to you to format the drive to the file type you need, FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS. If you have XP Vista or W7 your best option is NTFS.
As to brands, LaCie is the best but also the most expensive, most of the others are more than adequate for the job and as someone else has posted Seagate drives are some of the most reliable on the market, ideally you want one with a SATA interface for faster data transfer but this assumes you have a SATAe socket on your mainboard. Several of the SATA external drives also have a USB option so look at the sockets on your mainboard, if you have SATAe great, if not then USB.
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