Best external drive choice mow

[t-dog]

I have a couple of external drives a seagate 320gb usb 2.0 which I am giving to my daughter and a enclosed rosewill case with a 500gb 7200- usb 2.0 or esata conn.

My question is I'm going to buy a new back up drive because the enclosed drive sucks when trying to use the esata because I have to have on a boot up- Im running win7 64bit unit. but it is good to have. So I think I want a seagate pro glflex usb 3.0 because it runs at 7200rpm. Is this a good choice because of the 7200rpm and the usb 3.0 or is there something better.

The purpose of the drive is back up of home photos and video. Speed is important because I hate to wait. Also like not having to plug in a/c cord for the 3.5 enclosere.

 

[WyomingKnott]

I'm going to put in a plug for the way I use my ten external drives: Bare Drive Bay. Just slip the drive into the 5.25" slot and run with it. For example, http://kingwin.com/products/cate/mobile/racks/kf_1000_bk.asp . I get full SATA rates and no power cable.

However: A bare drive on a shelf is more vulnerable than one in an external case. If you go this route, invest in stout anti-static storage.

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The have-to-have-it-attached-at-boot issue has cropped up in the forums before, and I had a similar problem with my daughter's Dell machine, where I use an eSATA drive for backups. Some mobo/bios combinations are cranky and require that the eSATA port be disabled to boot without the drive attached. I chose to live with that on my daughter's machine.

Setting the controller mode in BIOS from the usual default of IDE to AHCI will frequently solve this problem, but it will prevent your machine from booting. There's an easy fix in Win7, something to enable before switching the controller mode; if I find it here in the Forum I'll edit this.

Edit: This thread: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/254373-32-ahci-mode-only , and see the link that sminlal provided.