Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler External hard drive recommendations

Wellll, here's what I ended up ordering:

Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station

Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM SATA II WD10EADS

I guess I'm not very good at taking advice, but at least now you can all say, "I told you so," if it ends up blowing up in my face. At least the Thermaltake is the same idea as the Aluratek, and I went with the Caviar Green because of the good comments about it being quiet with decent performance.

I have two of those WD (exact same model). Both fast and quiet.

Good to know. Thanks for the reassurance.

I have the Thermaltake on my Notebook PC. It's basically the same as the Aluratek, without the extra USB ports. You'll like it a lot.

I have two western digtal "my passports"... They are 500 gb each and don't need a separate power cable ( just uses the power from the USB). They work great and I really like them.

The good news is that the new hard drive is fast, cool, and quiet, just like it's supposed to be, and I was able to copy my documents, photos, and videos. The bad news is that my external drive that was behaving weird isn't wanting to give me any more of my data. My music was by far the bulk of my data, and I got very little off of it. I kept having to turn off and turn on the drive to get a little more, and the last time I tried that, it showed up as RAW, not FAT32, so I guess the computer can't even tell it's formatted. It's going to be very hard to replace all of the music. I have CDs of most of it, but for certain artists, I had plenty of tracks that were download-only that weren't official releases. Ouch. I'm leaving the drive off for a while and trying again later, so wish me luck.

Whew. It's letting me copy more.

Cooling it off often helps. You can even put it in a freezer for a few minutes if the failures are caused by metal expansion.

Yeah, the heat seems to be the problem. Thankfully, I'm getting most of the tracks I want now. Nice tip on the freezer.

Next step. Have a backup of your music. I need to do another backup since I have put more stuff on my HTPC.