External HD or Internal in a Enclosure?

If what you want is removable storage, I have had great success with "internal HDs and an enclosure." I have two 5.25" bays on my PC with Kingwin KF-1000 SATA enclosures. When I do a backup, or use data on a removable hard drive, I just slot it into the bay, no tray needed. When I'm done, I take it out, and no PC failure short of setting my house on fire can touch my backups.
Right now I have ten bare "internal" HDDs sitting in a padded anti-static case. I can get any one of them up and running at full speed in less than a minute. With Win7, I can then remove them without shutting down the system.

So if this was your goal, I recommend some sort of internal bay that accepts a bare SATA drive. I find these to be more convenient than the dock style, which is cooler-looking but leaves the drive vulnerable to being knocked off my desk.

Product links:

What I use: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817990001&Tpk=kingwin kf1000
Better, because it also takes 2.5" drives: http://kingwin.com/products/cate/mobile/racks/kf_252_bk.asp
Sexier but more fragile, in my opinion: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...35006&cm_re=esata_dock-_-17-735-006-_-Product
Extreme storage for external drives when not in use: http://www.turtlecase.com/ProductDetails.aspx?productid=36&directoryid=-1&ctrl=productdetails
 

acer0169

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An external HD is just an internal drive in an enclosure with a brand stuck on it. No difference but price. I would suggest getting a drive and popping it in an enclosure yourself, at least that way you know that the drive is a quality one. Look at the Caviar Green drives from WD.
 
I had several external drives in self-bought enclosures I used for archiving and backing up data. When it came time to upgrade to USB 3.0 I decided that rather than buying new enclosures for all of them I'd just buy a hard drive dock instead. Something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817193076
17-193-076-TS


The advantage of this is that you can simply buy bare internal drives and not spend money on an enclosure for each one. The downside is that you need a way to protect the bare drives - I wrap them in bubble wrap and put them into sealable plastic food containers that are just a bit larger than the drives. This actually gives them more shock protection than they'd get in a standard external enclosure.

A big advantage for me is that the bare desktop drives in bubble wrap fit into my bank's safety deposit box for offsite backup. Until I started using them I had to keep my offsite backup on external 2.5" drives/enclosures which have a lot less capacity.
 

icy dock

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Dec 15, 2010
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Hey honkeytot,

Here are couple more things to consider as well:

1. If you purchase an internal drive you will be able to use an enclosure to easily swap them out with a new one at any time, especially once it is filled. You can't do it with just an external device. Also, there are many removable enclosures that make it easy to carry around too!

2. With external devices, you may or may not be able to have the choice of multiple interfaces, which is handy and/or faster at times if you were to use one.

These are a couple points to add to with what everyone else had mentioned.

Hope this adds some more insight to your question!