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A cheap, 200+ gig hard drive?


Stickman

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I am looking for a large external hard drive. Ideally it will be firewire and not USB 2.0. I went into the local IT City (haven?t been to Panthip Plaza yet) and for an external 300 Gig hard drive the price was around 15,000 Thai baht. The 200 and 250 baht options were cheaper, but not by a lot. I thought I could do much better than that.

 

Is it possible to buy some sort of external case with a firewire port, purchase a large 3.5 inch hard drive, insert that into the case and plug that into my computer using a firewire cable? In theory it sounds simple, but is such hardware available in Thailand? If anyone has any ideas on availability and price locally, I would be very grateful.

 

Stick

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I'm not sure why you prefer firewire. Most firewire stuff runs at 400mbps where most USB stuff runs at 450mbps. There are enclosures to put a standard hard drive in with a firewire port, though I have no idea if they are available in Thailand or not. USB enclosures can be had for under 1000 baht.

 

15000 baht sounds very expensive for a basic 300GB drive. I see a 300GB drive for 5000 baht range here: http://www.thanni.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=438&sort=20a&page=3

 

To me the best external drive is a 2.5" drive that does not need a power brick. You can travel anywhere in the world with just a light, tiny drive and they go up to 200GB. They do cost more than comparable 3.5" drives. They perform pretty well too as 3.5" drive performance is capped by the USB interface. There are 2.5" enclosures that have both a USB *and* a firewire port.

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Hi

Have a look on E-Bay under "external drives", there's plenty of cases there with or without the hard drive's in them, and a good price and most will ship worldwide inc. Thailand. I've purchased a few from here.

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I bought an external case, USB 2.0, so that I could put old spare drives in them and then use as a back-up device. This was and still is a good, cheap solution. Just make sure you get an enclosure for a 3.5", not 2.5" drive.

 

Maybe the answer is different if you're going to be using the external drive a lot, as main data storage. Since I buy new components every month (or so it seems), I usually have top-end components in my computer case. For example, I am probably going to replace my SATA 150 drive with a SATA 300 within a couple of weeks. I think that will help with the HDTV video editing.

 

There seems to be quite a premium for getting the firewire enclosure. Even though I already have a USB 2.0 enclosure, I went to see how much an enclosure with the FW would cost. I THINK it was about 2,000 baht. That was a couple of months ago, though.

 

I don't know if you save money buying a kit (drive and enclosure) or separate components, if you're getting the 1394 port.

 

Yes, trip to Panthip is in order.

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i bought a LaCie 250 Gb drive with FireWire a couple of months ago at Fortune Plaza for 9900 Bt. Suits me fine. I daisy chain it via my Maxtor 250 Gb, which I bought 18 months ago for a lot more.

 

When i bought the Lacie, I considered a bigger drive, like a 500 or even a 1 TeraByte, but cost per Gb this was more economic. also, I considered it prudent not to put all my eggs in one basket. Everything i do is backed up on at least 2 external HDs, just in case one crashes (and on a DVD, too). if the 250 gets full, I just add another one.

 

BTW, Sitck, thanks for the referral to Rama III shop. I got the 24/1.4, and am very happy with it so far . Best equipped shop I've seen so far in LOS. Just a pity they don't do VAT refund.

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BaronTT,

 

have to disappoint you. I have SATA and SATA II drives. There's not much difference in speed between these. The last time I read about this in a computer magazine they stated exactly that: even though SATA II has the higher specification the current drives with SATA II interface don't really make use of it.

So don't expect too much of it. Of course if you're going to buy a new drive anyway then go for SATA II. There's no difference in price.

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Right on carlton. There is not a drive out there that has a media data transfer rate as quick as the SATA-1 bus speed. The performance gain from SATA-2 is when transferring data from the drives internal cache to your system which will burst at full speed. Hence, if going SATA-2 get a drive with the biggest possible cache to benefit from it the most. And don't forget you need a SATA-2 capable mobo as well. The other thing is SATA-2 doesn't necessarily mean you get this double speed interface. See this to learn what SATA-2 really means:

 

http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp

 

If you really care about speed, the new 150GB WD raptor SATA drive is 10000RPM and soundly blows away every 7200 drive by a wide margin, even beats a raid of 2. Typically higher spindle speeds like the raptor cost more and you give up leading edge capacity are the downsides.

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Is it possible to buy some sort of external case with a firewire port, purchase a large 3.5 inch hard drive, insert that into the case and plug that into my computer using a firewire cable?

 

Yes our Yankie friend who is about to get married at the end of march did that. 200G is about 3300B and the case was 450B for the USB. Plus it acts as a USB hub. You can find them at most hardware shops with USB. Not sure about firewire. Will look for you this weekend

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