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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!

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?

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. ;)

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.

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

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

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?

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!

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

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