help with a second HD

[Zoness]

Well I tried to use an old generic 40GB drive out of another machine for my alternative works and it doesn't work any more.

I need a second harddrive as a place to do all my studio work which ranges from sound to graphics to coding...plus I want to have a backup of my HD's media files just for good measure.

Is it worth it to get a second internal harddrive or an External that I can carry with me in the event of having to do work elsewhere. Is USB to slow for the kind of work I will be doing. Btw, anything I do isn't super-hardware heavy like GBs of files. Thanks in advance

 

[steckman]

You can buy an external enclosure for $25-$30 that will hold a regular internal hard drive and connects to the PC via USB 2.0 or firewire. USB 2.0 is pretty fast, and firewire is even better if your PC supports it. If you are just moving a couple of gigabytes around at a time, both should be plenty fast enough. And if you ever decide that you don't need the ability to carry the external drive around with you, just pop it out of the enclosure and stick it in your PC case.

 

[Zoness]

That sounds like a good idea. I wne tlooking to today and found enclosured for about $30, normal harddrives don't cost very much as opposed to external ones so it looks like a good deal.

 

[Codesmith]

If your motherboard has SATA ports, you can get one that has does IDE to SATA as well as USB 2.0. Then you can run SATA cable out of the case to connect with your main, but still have USB 2.0 with other PCs.

USB 2.0 for me is about 35MBps but SATA connection is the same speed as connecting the drive to an internal IDE port.

If you don't have SATA ports then don't bother with it.