External Hard Drive Recommendations

[55Kevy]

Hey Gang! I, too, have recently suffered a hdd crash. I still get the willies when I hear something that sounds like that distinctive clicking noise.

Anyway, after about 8 hrs on the phone to India, spread over 2 days, I got the OS reinstalled and things seemed to be good. I'd decided to get Norton Ghost to back up an image of my HD to DVD. But Ghost did something to the OS and I had to reinstall, yet again.

I've decided for someone as non-tech as I am that an external hdd is the way to go - but when I went looking at units I was overwhelmed. So I thought to come to this sage group and seek some counsel. What brand of hdd have people had good experiences with: no crashing, easy install, kind of a no-brainer experience. I'm looking for around a 120gb unit, USB (not sure if 1 or 2). Suggestions?

TIA
Kevy

[Darius Wey]

You'd definitely want a USB2 or FireWire interface, over USB1, unless you want to sit in front of your computer for a "decade" waiting for the backup to be transferred to your external HDD. The transfer rates of USB1 are disgustingly shocking by today's standards.

LaCie (http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10033) and Maxtor (http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.6adb6b8313633595062e6be791346068/?channelpath=/en_us/Products/External%20Hard%20Drives) are often popular manufacturers for external HDDs. You will find they have many makes and models, depending on what you're after. There are also different drive speeds, usually 5,400RPM or 7,200RPM. Personally, I've not tried any of these branded external HDDs as I usually just head down to my local computer store and purchase the usual internal HDD and an external caddy, and construct my own external HDD. It does the job and is a lot cheaper! ;)

[ctmagnus]

For the best of both worlds, there's this (http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=93), that has USB2 and FireWire interfaces. And you can get it in capacities up to 250GB, for futureproof-ness.