Any point in buying an "external" hard drive???

[herbster]

I am about to buy a new hard drive with the sole purpose of it being a full backup drive and want it to be external and be able to put it away safely and take it places, etc.

I have been checking prices and unless I am missing something, I cannot see how it makes sense to buy an external drive vs. buying a regular hd + hd enclosure to make it external.

Would love some opinion on this, I really need to buy one asap. Thanks guys!

EDIT: Woops forgot to mention she has got to be at least 300gb.

[n3tfury]

I am about to buy a new hard drive with the sole purpose of it being a full backup drive and want it to be external and be able to put it away safely and take it places, etc.

I have been checking prices and unless I am missing something, I cannot see how it makes sense to buy an external drive vs. buying a regular hd + hd enclosure to make it external.

Would love some opinion on this, I really need to buy one asap. Thanks guys!

EDIT: Woops forgot to mention she has got to be at least 300gb.

buying a regular enclosure is cheaper and doesn't come with backup software that is most likely windows only anyway. roll your own.

[Eric the Grey]

I've always used internal drives with stand alone enclosures. I cannot see any difference between them myself.

Possibly a plus to this method is that you can remove the drive and swap it out with another if need be. I don't know if you can do that with external drives.

I currently have two full-sized drives in enclosures, one 120gig, and one 20gig that I use for support (backup documents before re-installing windows...) plus one 40-gig laptop hard drive in a mini-enclosure. This thing is the bomb of portable drives. I use ti all the time to transport large files from one machine to another when networking them isn't possible...


:cool: Eric the Grey

[x0as]

It worked out cheap for me to buy an external drive. I bought a seagate freeagent 250gb for £43.99, the same shop wanted £41.95 for a seagate Barracuda 250gb, would have been £10+ enclosure.

No way I could have done it cheaper & still used a seagate drive.

[herbster]

Thanks a lot fellas. That's a good point, Eric, thanks for bringing that up. I would love to be able to make any drive external, that adds a lot of value.