Where to buy external hard drives

My laptop's burner seems to be on the blink, and I've long been thinking about an external hard drive for it to stop me having to burn so many DVDs for datasets / photos and the like. I reckon to be useful for the next couple of years something over 200Gb would be ideal. There's a 250Gb model in Saturn by Lacie... USB 2.0 etc. for 139 Euros. Are they a reputable brand? Would I be better off going elsewhere?

If it makes any difference, the drive will hopefully stay at home almost all of the time, so doesn't have to be particularlly rugged, and needing its own power source isn't a worry. I'd rather buy an all in one solution rather than a hard drive and enclosure, but if there is a good reason for doing the later I'm willing to consider it. It won't be my only backup, but I'd rather it lasted a while!

Cheers...

Litec?

I find NetonNet to be often better value than Saturn et al.

Your 250Gb LaCie is €129 with them. See here.

There are some great German dealers operating on Ebay.de

WH

Hi

I recently bought a 160 GB external (FreeCom, guts made by Samsung) at Conrad for 99 Euros. Works great, extremely quiet, USB hookup was really plug and play. I would recommend this one!

Litec,Bauers,NB,Computer Gallerie,Mistco

All located down near Hbf on Schillerstrasse,Ladwehrstrasse or Schwanthalerstrasse..

Lacie works good as far as I know. I bought a 160 GB Trekstor from MediaMarkt for 89.00 last year. No problems so far, quiet enough, very easy to install. I couldn't do what I wanted to do with it, which was booting linux from the external, but that was probably because I didn'T try hard enough. I got bored!!
In amazon.de you can find some 200 GB disks for 119.00. Dunno how good the brand is, but you could go and do some research about it.

Thanks for your suggestions guys - I'll see what I can find.

This looks pretty good:
Ebay Seller

If you click on the little link which equates to the Ebay group where that is, you'll find lots more.

WH

I've had quite a few external HDDs and the only real difference that I've noticed is how quickly the drive is recognized by the computer when plugged in. Enclosures with Seagate drives have always worked far better in that respect than enclosures with Maxtor or Western Digital drives. I've even taken old Seagate HDDs and put them in enclosures that formerly held WD and Maxtor drives and noticed they get recognized much faster.

If it were me, I'd buy my HDD of choice (Seagate - always) and put it in a decent enclosure. Sure, it's more expensive, but at least you know what you're getting (as I recall most External HDD makers don't bother to tell you who actually makes the HDD that they use).

I bought a 250Gb Lacie a few months ago, probably would not recommend it, it is a nice looking small unit, but gets very hot, makes a little more noise than I would like, and does not like to share a USB bus with other units, ie. halfway through copying, all usb devices fail to respond and require reboot to find again, this did not happen before I added the unit so I am currently presuming it is to blame
Hope this helps

Also possible to buy external casing and make your own one as well. A bit of hassle I know, but would work out cheap and you get to select your own type of hard drive.

There's a great product called "Cutie" which is an external housing for 2.5" HDs. It has external power and a battery that will hold around half an hour's charge (doesn't charge through USB). The neat trick with it is that you can connect any device through a mini-USB cable (USB->mini USB converter included) and hit a button on it and the thing will back up that device, no computer needed. It's been a godsend during photo shoots at concerts when I blow through 15GB of pictures with only 5GB of CF cards. I simply connect the card reader to it, insert the card and hit the button. It can also do external drive back-ups and then function as a normal external driev when conencted to a computer. The thing costs about €70 and doesn't come with a drive.

MediaMarkt also has 100GB external mini HDs which power solely from USB. They're small and run only around €100. The only problem I've had is that some computers don't recognise them. I haven't yet found any reason for this -- it's always hit-or-miss. Again, this sort of drive is exceplent because it's small, lightweight and doesn't ened an external power supply. You can put it in your pocket.

woof.

Thats what i did and it was no hassle at all. I got a 30Gig laptop hard drive for about 30 pound and a case of ebay for around 10 pound and hey presto job done. It needs no external power supply and fits into my shirt pocket.

Great for transporting all my porn erm assignments from home to uni.

160Gb from €84, and 300Gb for €131 here

If you get a 3.5" disk, make sure the case has active cooling i.e. a fan. The number one cause of disks going tits up is overheating. This especially applies to higher capacity drives.

I'll second DrivinWest's recommendation, Seagate are top of the pile at the moment.

I checked out the various internet shops, and they become a bit less competitive after P&P. I'm a bit unsure of ebay, so went round the various shops near Hbf. for an hour or so, but nothing quite fitted the bill. In the end went to Saturn, only to find that their prices had dropped, and the 250 Gb was going for 129 E - lower than anything else I had seen online or off (this was before YL6's post). It's a Seagate drive, with 8Mb cache and a USB 2.0 connection. It's sat there backing up all my data at the moment - hopefully won't suffer from overheating as mentioned by jellyone.

Anyway. Jobs a good'un, and thanks for all your suggestions.

They still got those Lego Hard Drives in Saturn?

[img]http://z.about.com/d/peripherals/1/0/S/1/hd_brick_desktop_blue-red.jpg[/img]

Quick Description

and yes you can stack them

www.pocketec.com

personally id recommend getting a hard drive enclosure like an icybox and stick you own hard drive in

look at www.overclockers.co.uk dunno what the prices are like in germany but firewire icyboxs allow you to daisychain the storage together without the need of wasting usb ports

also icybox do a notebook enclosure thats the same size as an ipod i got a 60gb hard drive for that, that fits in my pocket and doesnt need a power supply either and practically silent too

bit more expensive for the notebook hard drive but far more practicle if you moving around alot not needing to carry loads of extra cables and a big bulky case

Hehe... €107.50+€7.99 postage at my link

Do these icyboxes need external power supply or can you power it off the USB2.0 port ? I'd like to get say another 100GB with one of these boxes
[img]http://www.training-xp.de/wordpress/wp-content/IcyBox-25.jpg[/img]

I've also been toying with the idea of getting an external hard drive and was quite excited when I saw the lacie in saturn a few weeks ago...However the saturn at Teriesienhohe (if thats how you spell it) had a different range and prices to the one in the town centre. I looked carefully in the twon centre saturn and found a TEAC 320Gb model for the same price as the lego bricks on prominent desplay at the front of the display pile (250Gb). Plus i compared prices with LITEC and was surprised to find Saturn cheaper. Having said that i just coughed up 10 euros too much for a wireless keyboard at saturn that is on offer in Tchibo...damn...

no they dont need external power supply cables (ie a power cable to a plug socket)
i got the black one and you get 2 cables with it. both are for usb one is for data and the other is for power

however mine works from just the data usb cable connected...

I purchased a Lacie 250GB external hard drive from Saturn at Christmas only to have the controller fail a couple of weeks later. Can anyone recommend what the best course of action would be bearing in mind that I have all my data backed up on the latter? Obviously I have to return it, however I have to try to get a professional to fix it so that I can recover my data beforehand. Who, if anyone, can I get to cover this expense considering that the item is brand-new? Do I have any recourse? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Im sure it must have happend before so im wondering if they will be able to recover the porn data at Saturn.

Remove the HD from the Ext. case, and connect it up to your desktop PC. If only the Ext. box's USB controller is dead
then you should still be able to access the HD directly from a desktop PC. If the HD is dead too, then your Fooked...

No, they won't recover your data at saturn. They have no Tech. skills what so ever (nor the software/hardware/test bench).
The task is up to you. All they will do is give you another one, or your $$ back providing you still have the Reciept.

If you feel you can't do this or don't know how, send me a PM

See also Harddisk data recovery services, Some recommended specialists

Bring it round, and we'll see if we can help.

Hi there,

I'm looking into buying an external hard drive with 500GB for my PC & Laptop. As I have no idea whatsoever about all the technical sides of the things, could anyone tell me whether this particular one is any good, either from personal experience or from the technical details below? The brand is My Book from Western digital.
Or if you know another brand which you can highly recommend, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a million times!

Technische Details
Rotational Speed: 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size: 16 MB
Average Latency: 4.20 ms (nominal)
Read Seek Time: 8.9 ms
Track-To-Track Seek Time: 2.0 ms (average)
FireWire 800:
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394b): 800 Mbits/s (Max)
FireWire 400:
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394a): 400 Mbits/s (Max)
USB 2.0:
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0): 480 Mbits/s (Max)
Formatted Capacity: 500,107 MB
Capacity: 500 GB
Interface: Triple Interface
Height: 172.2 mm (Max)
Length: 143 mm (Max)
Width: 56.7 mm
Weight: 1.2 kg
Operating: 5° C to 35° C
Non-operating: -20° C to 65° C

Those specs look good I'm not sure if its a good deal you didn't offer any price. You most likely don't need the triple interface (only very few Macs have Firewire 800, usually only macs even ahve Firewire 400) so a USB2.0 one will likely be less expensive.

Hi Jcastle,

I didn't realise it was only for Mac platform (they cost between 115-140).
I need something for Windows based computers.

Edit: Oops, did you mean they are for both Pcs & Macs? I've been working too long today and my brain is not working properly!

Yes it will work on both! Just the Firewire interface (redundant to USB connection) is found on every mac, very few PCs. For me though, I have a firewire hard drive because both my USB slots are already used up for my iPod and camera card reader.

I was just implying one with only one interface, USB only, would likely not be as expensive.

thanks Jcastle.

I bought a pile of Trekstor 500Gb external drives from Amazon when they were on offer at €99 last month. They've gone up to €108.95 now (including shipping) and are still a reasonable deal.

I've been looking at external hard drives and have found one from Seagate with 500GB for about $140CAD (about 90 Euro). As a general rule, though, I've found electronics to be less expensive in Germany than here. So I'm thinking that maybe I ought to wait 2 weeks until I get back to Munich to buy the damn thing, that way (if the cost is roughly the same) I don't have to worry about getting it from here to there on top of everything else. Anyways, what I'm wondering is if anyone could tell me what they're called in German so that I can go about looking for one, or if anyone knows offhand where I can look, that would be great too.
Thanks.

ext hard drive in german is externe festplatte

that said, i bought a 500gb at saturn a couple months ago on special for 99€ and recently ive seen them for the same if not cheaper "normal price"

if you wanna look for electronics, then saturn or conrad are good places to start.

Schillerstr used to be the place to go for stuff like this, but when I bought a 500GB external earlier this year I ended up getting it in Saturn because it was significantly cheaper.

I'm not sure about the capacity of the external harddrive I bought earlier this year at Conrad, 500GB I think, but it was €60-ish.