Advice good external

[mpavao81]

I am looking to get 2 external hard drives, one is for a gift for my mom's laptop. She only has a 300GB hard drive in her laptop and I thought she could use a nice external for more space and backup. For that one im looking for a rugged portable drive around 750GB+ she has USB 2.0 on her laptop

And one for my self for my Desktop I have USB 2.0/ESATA that I could use. I would be using mine for backup and extra storage space. I am looking for something that is reliable and great performance. And im looking for 2TB+ external

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
thanks

 

[WyomingKnott]

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

For your mother, 750 GB takes us out of the range of 2.5" devices. Perhaps a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136747&cm_re=usb_2.0_external_hard_drive-_-22-136-747-_-Product ?

For eSATA, I am fond of my Nexstar enclosure: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&Description=3%2E5%20esata%20enclosure&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20 , in which I put my own drive. But it's expensive and only got two eggs. For half the price, you could get this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392026&cm_re=nexstar_esata-_-17-392-026-_-Product . In any case, I would buy an enclosure and put in my own drive unless you are not handy.

And, since you said that any advice would be greatly appreciated, I'm going to go off on a tangent. I have ten "external" drives. One is in the eSATA enclosure. The other nine are bare drives. When I need to use one, I plug it into this: http://kingwin.com/products/cate/mobile/racks/kf_1000_bk.asp . If you prefer something that can be attached to more than one computer, something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392022&cm_re=esata_dock-_-17-392-022-_-Product might work. I have owned one such device, and both the dock and the eSATA cable broke, so I stick with my installed-bay dock.

Edit: I'm not pushing NewEgg, really. It's just a convenient place to find pictures of products.

 

[ssddx]

i agree with knott

picking out your own enclosure and own drive does give you lots of options. as for recommended drives: currently the samsung spinpoints and western digital caviar blacks are favored. i've had bad luck with the wdcb 1.5tb 64mb cache models though.

however,

if you only plan on having the one external for regular backups then having bare drives like the last suggestion above might not be for you. in the case where you require lots of drives for backup or need to swap hard drives often then such a setup is great.

newegg is great. lots of product info, reviews, photos. decent prices and shipping is fast (and sometimes free!). definitely one of my first places to go when searching for pc parts.

 

[mpavao81]

Best answer selected by mpavao81.

 

[mpavao81]

Thanks I had not considered going with an enclosure, but im starting to think that would be the better way. Then I can pick exactly what drive I want inside.
thanks guys.