Another USB external hard drive question

With just about all external usb hard drives having some bad reviews is it better to build one.
Frys has a 400GB internal for 100.00 then add the case for about 30.00.
Would this be better or the same?
Dont understand why the externals have a lot more problems. Do they use the same drives or they just get moved around a lot more?

 

with a prebuilt external drive you can get one button backup (as in Maxtor's OneTouch) or perhaps some free backup software. building your own external drive might save u some money though i havent looked into it.

as for problematic external drives, it could be because of heat or the chipset used.

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that said, the nexstar 2 enclosure i had and western digital drive i have are quite good.

 

The problems with externals you read about on this forum has to do with the chipsets not playing nice with the PC's USB chipset - not the drives themselves. Problem usually has to do with transferring very large files like images.

I buy the HD and the enclosure and stick the drive in it myself. I am not interested in 1-button restores, extra software or fancy packaging.

 

Hi Guys,

Seekforever - I'm with you buy a drive & case, very simple. I even made one from a salvaged TIVO.

Also store bought USB's are formatted in 'Fat32' for backward compatibility with Windows98 etc. It's a good idea to do a quick format to NTFS if your going to have large files on the drive.

Take Care
Rico

 

I would use for 2 PC's about 15GB to backup on each one but one is an older dell got in 2002 came with win XP but the drive has part in FAT32 and FAT16 would this be a concern if I formatted the new external drive to NTFS?
Thanks

 

Yes, It wil not work if you try to back-up a FAT32 or FAT16 onto an NTFS formatted drive. NTFS is the best to use though. You might try cloning the old drive first onto an external set to FAT32, make sure it works, then convert your existing FAT32 drive to NTFS. If something happens you have a back-up for safety. If it does work, you have a much better solution.

By the way, I use an external drive for a back-up. I prefer to use an internal drive in an external case because internal drives are cheaper and if something ever happens to the external drive, it costs less to replace. Also, if you clone your drive, you can remove the drive from the external mount, put it in your computer, and you are back in business. You can then get another internal drive to put back in the external case for your back-up. There are many options.

 

Ditto this ... buy the drive and enclosure separately. Save yourself a few dollars and if you need to, you can open the enclosure and put another drive in and you have more than one external drive. Those ready-made externals are sometimes hard to figure out how to open them.

 

I disagree. The structure of the source has no bearing on how the output is written. To make an image TI gathers up the sector information, formats it and writes it into a .tib file. The file is written to the device and it doesn't matter if it is NTFS - the file system takes care of it automatically.

FAT32 partitions and NTFS partitions co-exist on systems and networks and the files are written and read back and forth just fine.

If you clone rather than image a FAT partition to a NTFS partition the NTFS structure gets blown away and the structure written is a clone of the source's FAT.

 

I think backups to FAT formatted usb drives runs slower for some folks. If your FAT usb takes a backup file very slowly, try formatting NTFS.