Running out of room on my pc and thinking of getting an external hard drive

[Hellacious D]

So I want like a 500 gb hard drive. Are there differences between the various hard drives that would affect sound quality? I don't want to just purchase a random 100 dollar hard drive and miss out on some feature that could have made my music experience better. Any advice, suggestions, or help is very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Jay

 

[devin_mm]

Get a firewire or eSATA drive, beyond that a hard drive is a hard drive, I typically buy an enclosure and put an nice cheap hard drive in it.

I really dislike USB for anything but keyboards and mice, I've never had a USB DAC though.

 

[gz76]

Quote:

a hard drive is a hard drive

Drives also have different speeds, buffer sizes, warranties, reliability histories, etc.

All hard-drives are not made the same.

 

[beemer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gz76 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Drives also have different speeds, buffer sizes, warranties, reliability histories, etc. All hard-drives are not made the same.

Yeah, but they are pretty close. Especially in the interest of listening to music they are all about the same, with the exception of warranty. Seagate has the best warranty, 5 years I believe on all of their products while most of the others only carry 1 year. I also don't care for usb hard drives, and prefer esata & firewire over it. However on my desk right now, I have 2 esata drives, and 2 usb2.0 drives totaling 1 terabyte. I've listened to music from all of them, can't tell a difference.

 

[TMM]

In terms of performance for listening to music, they are all exactly the same. Just get the quietest one
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page2.html

 

[Zorander]

I would go for the most reliable brand first and foremost as nothing sucks more than losing all your data in a crash and not having backed them up. Next, a quiet drive would be nice, assuming the rest of your PC components are not noisy too.

My experiences with Seagate drives for the past 10 years has been great: no failures at all! However, their recent drives have been progressively getting noisier (a far cry from the really silent Barracuda IV I still have and use), so I have lately started using Samsung drives which are great too. SPCR recently recommended the new WD drives for their quiet and fast operation, but I am still wary of going that way. Some resellers I know warned me that the reliability of WD drives have historically been inconsistent so you may either get a drive that lasts for ages or one that fails shortly after you bought it. While I have not had a WD drive fail on me, one did develop the infamous high-pitched whine. YMMV.

Cheers!

 

[rxc]

I've used them all and I like Samsung drives the best for performance and quietness. Actually the last 3 drives have been Samsung.

Samsung>Hitachi>Seagate>WD (Bad experience with WD)

 

[devin_mm]

If you don't need a whole tonne of space consider maybe a 250GB notebook drive in an enclosure it will be quiet and be powered by your USB bus (if you decide on USB that is).

 

[HFat]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hellacious D /img/forum/go_quote.gif Any advice, suggestions, or help is very much appreciated.

crap happens. Please do backup your stuff... that means that you'll need at least TWO external hard drives or some other way of backing up your stuff (such as an account on a remote server and a fat pipe).

Any drive will do. The small ones that run on USB power are very cool indeed but they're expensive.

 

[thebob]

I'd reccomend optical backups everytime. You could also loose your backups if your HD's get a virus or your house has a lightening strike!

But pick a good stratergy. A big stack of DVD-RW's for a complete backup, then incremental backups (just the stuff thats not on your complete back up) every day or week or so.

Also plan your next Total backup for a month or three down the road. This time use a new stack of DVD-RW's. The next time you do a Total backup over write the first stack , and so on.

This way you will have a back-up of your back-up in case you get screwed while backing-up. If you see what I mean.

Good luck with your new drive.