Thread: external HDD or internal HDD with enclosure?

some help guys, also, please give me the reason and perhaps a recommendation

Am I missing something...you've already posted this here?

My guess is that based on the previous thread, where he asked for an external HD recommendation and got feedback suggesting that external HD drives suck (which they do) he is now interested in an enclosure. If that is indeed the case, I would suggest the following enclosure:

hxxp://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=28596&vpn=NST-300S2-BK&manufacture=VANTEC

I bought this based on the recommendation of a friend, and put a 1TB WD Caviar Black drive into it. Combined the cost was roughly the same as you would pay for a "decent" external HD, except that you now have control over the quality of the drive itself, you get a longer warranty, and you gain the flexibility of being able to put in a new drive once you fill up the existing one.

I do agree with the one person in the other thread who mentioned that hard drives might be more prone to failure in an enclosure, even if the enclosure and the drive are high quality. Personally I would guess this is mainly to do with heat issues. The enclosure I mentioned above does get quite hot after the drive has been on for a while, so if you go this route I would suggest only turning it on when necessary (ie when you are copying stuff onto it for backup etc) and NOT to watch movies off of for example.

Or, you could just get a quality HD and put it in your PC case, but I agree its nice to have an external option just for ease of use and flexibility (I got one to go along with my laptop, which didn't have too much storage).

Hope this helped!

Choose one that has eSATA or it will be slow as ... :P

A lot of friends ask me to load up their external 1TB drives but it never finishes because it takes ages to copy all that stuff.

I always buy internals with an enclosure. You usually get more for your money. And you can easily choose between the connection types you want or need (USB, Firewire, eSate).

You could just buy a cheap hotswap setup, and swap in a couple of drives.

It'll be removeable, yet incredible fast and stable.

Other than that, I'd say a low-storage eSATA external would do aswell. Low storage as externals have a lower lifespand as they're more thrown around with, and you don't want 1TB to vanish from your ratio, having to redownload everything.

For my money it makes far more sense to revive a really old computer that's essentially worthless, and turning it into a NAS. Look into FreeNAS.

I just bought the Fantom FG2000EU and it works great. The eSATA is what makes it worth while of course.

Fantom GF2000EU G-Force External Hard Drive - 7200 RPM, eSATA, USB 2.0, 2TB, 32MB Cache at TigerDirect.com

tempting Peace... tempting. But I always wanted to try the external enclosure, so I guess it will be my next buy