What does everyone think of this external hard drive? I have been thinking of getting one for all my movies, music, programs etc but have not been sure what to get. I found this at a a local retailer and it looks good!

But what do you guys think of it? Worth the money? Will I ever use the whole 320GB (even though formatted, a hard drive is never what it says it is! ) If not, how big should I go? Are other brands better?

Also, I've heard that these drives use a Seagate Drive! Is the Seagate brand respectable enough, will i be looking for a new one too soon (Hopefully Not!)

-jimmy

I have a LaCie external drive (160gb) and I am very happy with it. It is maybe 3 or 4 years old.
It has a SUPER thick, strong, protective metal shell and stands upright to conserve space.
It has a cool blue power light (the power button) and supports firewire and usb. The one possible
downside is that it comes formatted for OS X so I had to format and partition the drive to FAT32
so that I could use it on mac and pc (I work between the two frequently).

They make good products and they seem to last longer than many other external drives,
because they are better protected. I have had other brand fail on me before and this one
is still going strong after carrying it around town in my backpack all the time.

this is the one that I have: http://i.pricerunner.com/prod/12_12_18_2_2...160GB_SATA.jpeg

Seagate produces an expensive, but great HDD. We've used them in servers for years. I have a 1TB Western Digital (2x500GB) firewire drive along with several MyBook Western Digital. Mainly because I think "I need more HDD space for this video project" and run out to Best Buy and get whatever they have in stock. The fact that they are Mac OS X formated is a plus, but I run on macs.

Just so you know, if you don't need one right away, tigerdirect.com has them on sale quite often (seagate drives) with really big rebates.
I got my 230gb seagate drive for 23 dollars after rebates (I think it about 150 before rebate).

I'm not sure about Lacie having Seagate model drives in them, but if they do, I would definitely recommend getting one. I have used Seagate and Maxtor brand hard drives for almost 10 years now and love both of them. Seagate is a bit better since they have a big 5 year warranty from all the hard drives I bought.

If you plan to put movies and other big applications on this hard drive, I recommend getting the biggest hard drive you can afford. Or get two of them if it's cheaper that way

One setback I see in these external drives is that they are made to be external "permanently". I suggest getting one of those USB/Firewire Enclosure drives instead if you plan to upgrade the hard drive. I usually buy one or two of these enclosures and whenever I need a certain hard drive, I just pop it into my enclosure and plug it into the computer. It will make the internal hard drive act as an external one by using those enclosure cases.

Just to give you an example of what these look like, take a look here. Make sure you get the 3.5" ones (or a combo of 3.5" and 5.25") so it will fit the regular internal IDE hard drives. The 2.5" are for laptop hard drives and the 5.25" are for CD/DVD drives. Yes, you can make those into externals as well

Thanks for your replys! I have actually gone out and bought it and its great! When it was installing the drivers in XP it actually said that it was a segate drive, which sound good from what you have said!

thanks for your ideas
-jimmy

hard drive
Lacie 320gb External Hard Drive

How many music file can fit on a 320 gb hard drive.

Obviously it depends on both the bitrate and the length

(192kb/s would yield 192000/8 bytes per second [24KB/s] and each minute of music would yield 24*60 KBytes [1,440 KBytes, which I guess would be just a little too much for a floppy lol] )

so, using the equation:

(average bitrate)/8 * 60 * (total number of minutes)

you could figure out how much space your music would take.... (in Kilobytes, where I'm calling a KB 1,000 bytes)... depending on whether you consider a kilobyte to be 1,024 or 1,000 would alter slightly your result...


obviously to figure out how many minutes of songs you could put on a 320 GB hdd, you could change the equation around to yield:

( 320,000,000 / 1440 ) = number of minutes for 192 kb/s music

so,

320,000,000 / ( avg-bitrate/8 * 60 ) should yield the number of minutes you could store on such a drive... where obviously the avg-bitrate will vary... as well as the number of minutes per track, which you would possibly have to average (throwing out of course samples and whatnot that are about 1 to 5 seconds long...)

all in all, a good guess would be

(size in GB * 1,000,000) / ( [avg-bitrate kb/s]/8 * 60 ) = number of minutes

then you could divide number of minutes by a close average.... say 3-4 which is a good radio length approximation... and you could find your answer... which would of course be approximate, and which is why i generally ignore the table they like to put on the packaging which states how many songs or pictures you could store...


maybe this helps? lol

Careful, you're doing base 10 math up there. To go from GB to MB, you need to multiply by 2^10 (1024) not 10^2. And so on for MB to KB. I realize you specified and all, but it's tucked in the middle there

This post has been edited by ethergeek: Jan 4 2008, 12:01 AM

I would actually recommend you buy a separate drive and buy an enclosure and assemble it yourself if you want to save money. Buying a pre-built drive is usually more expensive than you assemble it yourself, mainly because you get to choose what drive manufacturer you want and the case manufacturer.

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