Help With Choosing An External Hard Drive

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I need an external hard drive that is well cooled (or runs at a decent temperature), that has capacity 300GB, and is USB2.0 or FireWire compatible (or both). It needs to be reliable and fast.

Its usage: I rip all my CDs to fairly high quality MP3s. (I like having my music easily accessible/searchable). I store them on an internal hard drive, but don't want to lose them due to hard drive failure. I have well over 100GB now, and re-ripping takes far too long (I rip in secure mode for ultimate quality, so it takes a long time to rip a CD).

I basically want an external hard drive to backup these files. I don't need/want a RAID solution or anything like that. Everytime I rip an album, I will copy it to the ext. hard drive too. I just want to have two instances of my music. Perhaps I will use a program that will create an image of the hard drive and copy it every night.

So basically, 300GB+, quality, reliability, USB+Firewire, low temperature.

I'm not sure what is required to make it run cool.

There aren't any real budget constraints, I'm looking for something to meet all or most of my criteria, so suggest anything that is available at OCuK.

Thanks in advance!
 
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I was after the same, and settled on a SohoTank from Stardom and fitted a 300G Maxtor inside.

Have a look here:

http://www.stardom.com.tw/web/index_e.htm

It runs super cool, and being aluminium it is very robust, unlike many others.

.........just found OCUK don't stock the Stardom above, but they do have a SATA case which looks much the same (OCUK part number = HD-002-BT).

See here:

http://www.stardom.com.tw/web/index_e.htm


EDIT: The links are to their top level, youll have to click through. The models are U6 and U7.

Hope this helps.
 
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Thanks for your reply, Michael.

So basically, I just connect that Stardom enclosure to an USB 2.0 Port and enjoy fast speeds?

Can I put SATAII hard drives in it, or does it only support SATAI?

How well does it cool the HDD inside? I'm thinking of sticking a 400GB SATA drive in there and will transfer ~100-300GB across to it once a day. I'm worried how much it'll heat up during this massive transfer. I really need something that has a great cooling solution.
 
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Much better and often cheaper to DIY!
That way you can get a decent reliable hd (Seagate) and buy a decent case to chuck it in.

Then you will have an external Hd with 5 years warranty instead of the crippled warranties that are supplied with external hd's.
 
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N9ne,

Check the links for the tech' spec'......

How cool? How about near ambient? Superb cooling with these cases! They are made of aluminium and mine has a fan in the back of the case (it's the U7 model).

I wanted to do exactly what you are doing, transfering huge quantities of data, that's why I settled on the Stardom.

Once the drive has been fitted, I plugged it into a USB port, and set it up from the Disk Manager in Win XP (registration and partitioning).

Btw, I can post some pics, if you want!

Best wishes,

Michael
 
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Pics would be great.

The tech specs don't really say whether it supports SATAII. Everywhere it just says SATA. What advantages does SATAII have over SATA?

So it's as simple as plugging it into a USB port? Does it get all its power from the PSU too?
 
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I have been using an IcyBox (USB2 + Firewire) and WD 320Gb combination (Firewire) for the past few weeks and it's been fine. I can touch the enclosure and it's barely warm, so cooling seems to be OK.

I have the IDE version, but may get the SATA one also, as I have a few spare SATA drives. However, I think it is SATA I only?
 
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^ But virtually all sata-II drives (whatever that is exactly :o ) are backwards compatible and it's not like you'll miss any speed, since your transferring via usb anyway.

No-one seems to be replying to my thread about sata hard-disc enclosures, so I thought I'd post in this one!

The: "Enermax External Enclosure EB305C IDE/SATA to USB2.0 - Black" at £29.32

looks good since it's ide and sata (and cheap!). The Stardom does look pretty professional though.
 
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