Was just fishing for any thoughts on this . I need more space. which way to go that is the ????????

THat depends.. space for what? Stuff you need frequently? How big is your current drive? Do you have 1 or 2 drives now?

If your current drive is pretty small compared to what is on the market.. ie 20 or 30 gB, you could get a 200 or 250 to replace it. Most of them come with some software to copy everything over to the new drive. The extra 10% you would have from keeping the old drive wouldn't be worth the electricity and noise of keeping it powered up.

If your 2nd drive will be closer to what you have now, most all desktops have a space and cable already there to add a second drive.

From perusing the ads, an external drive costs up to 2x as much per gigabyte..one recent sale flyer featured an external 160 gb for US$160 where an internal might be $80. You can get an empty external enclosure and put the drive in yourself. I recently did that with $26 for the enclosure + $139 for the drive total $166 for a 250 gB external.

My bottom line feeling is that externals are best where they have an advantage..
things you don't need connected all the time, or that you want portable to another computer. Old photos, a copy of your music, system and document backup...

That shifts if you are using a laptop as you can't get really big drives and merely large ones are expensive, so I have gone with an external that is hooked to a USB hub along with external mouse etc for whenever I am home.

External hard drives are great. I bought a 250 gig Maxtor and a Vantec external enclosure for it. I have all my music files on the external HD setup. I'm a recording engineer for a friend's band and we record digitally. I use this hard drive as a backup. I just take it to our studio. Saves less time than burning to DVD or other such backup media. I wouldn't recommend editing with an external HD, things can get slow and sometimes they lock up. Otherwise for data storage that you may want to be able to have other places while leaving your computer at home, externals are the way to go.

Vantec external enclosure does it keep it cool ? ( I went with the 250gb maxtor internal)

I have a question about building your own "external hardrive." Do the enclosures come with all the connections? I am very interested in doing this, but am not sure how the internal hard drive is connected to the usb 2.0 external enclosure.

Thanks in advance

Yeah. the Vantec seems to keep my HD cool. I've never had a problem with it so far.




The external hard drive enclosures come with all the needed connections inside the enclosure.