External Drives

[Thurston Garden]

Can anyone point me in the direction of a decent external hard drive?

After *cough* copying some new music onto my D drive, alas it was full! Having been thinking about my Ubuntu route, I thought about a decent sized external HDD for my music and photos, thus freeing up my D drive which could then be the partition for Ubuntu.

I would like though to clag the hard drive to my Netgear wireless router and stow it away in the large cupboard by the window - this has power inside, and the router on the top so connection should be easy. The netgear router has no usb ports which seen to be a common connection on external drives.

To complicate matters further, I read somewhere about being able to run my Squeezebox off an NDS (??) drive with the laptop off.

Any suggestions on a good buy?

Thanks in advance!

[revdode]

Lacie make external ethernet hard drives which are pretty decent. The one I installed was only 500Gb and cost under £200, I think it's cheaper now.

The only problem I have with these devices (It wasn't my disk) is how do you backup that much data?

[Cornelian]

I have a Maxtor external hard drive which I have had about 2 years). It is about 200 G, but they come much larger now. I've had no problems with it at all.

Backing up data - do it once and then as needed. ;)

[colhut]

well, it might be overkill but...
http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/Sea ... CatId=2876

is a 1Tb network attached storgae device. it also supports DLNA, which I think means it should be able to stream to somthing like a sdeezebox direct (I'd check that one though cos my knolwedge there is sketchy to say the least).

that aside there are a number of network attched drives, either ethernet or wireless. depends on your pocket mostly.

[wulf]

How much storage do you need? Do you need instant access to all the information you would be storing.

I've been very happy with an 80GB Freecom external USB drive I picked up a few months ago; as a bonus, it is powered via the USB cable rather than requiring an extra plug. For smaller amounts of data where you can live with not always having it online, that might be a cheaper solution (and is also very handy if you need to transfer large amounts of information to another computer).

Wulf

[Lord Azrael]

You can get a quality external 500GB hard drive for about £99 nowadays, easily enough space for most things.

[Thurston Garden]

Sorry - been away for a couple of days but thanks for all the replies!

Looking for something like 300Gb+. 500 would be good if there was a good deal going.

Running the Squeezebox from it is not that important - but connecting it to our network is. Am I right in thinking that all I need to do is get one with an ethernet port, hook it up to the router and it will appear in My Network Places?

[Thurston Garden]

Well, I finally bought one. A 500Gb NAS drive. It did take a while to work out how to remap the drive so I could see it on my network, but it's working great.

Now it's time for a good clear out - move stuff and back other stuff up. Then who knows, a rainy day and I might do a clean install, and perhaps a partition for Ubuntu!

[mrsflibble]

I have an iomega 320gb ext hd. it cost me £52.99 in the staples sale.

[Super.Niki]

Maxtor are very reliable and WD are good (but be warned thier USB ports are a little dodgy... they come in FireWire though aswell which is good if you've got FW ports).

Most of ours are Maxtors... though a lot of them keep working after the computer's powered off (I found this out because my poota's in my room and they're SO NOISY!!) so maybe one with a swith is a good idea? I've got a good 300GB one by ATMT running at the moment for my *ahem* music collection :D