Wide World of Women

So I have been price shopping some hard drives. And also debating on internal vs external. Internals being cheaper than externals, but you can only put so many in there. Externals are easy but are kind of bulky and a little more. So why not have the best of both I say.

http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Products.aspx?C=1346

Its a hard drive docking station. Now you can buy all the internal drives and still access them without opening your computer

From users who have bought this say its wonderful. Doesnt get hot or anything. If you were to get this bad boy, and then say two or three 1TB hard drives you would be set for awhile

thought this would be helpful to those who are accumulating those rather large .ts or .mkv files

Wow, that's interesting. I've actually thought of buying a sata card and switching out internal drives, but I never tried it. This looks much easier than that. This could also work as a fairly inexpensive and fast way to back up and keep stuff that you wouldn't readily access. I've got a 4 port eSata card that I use for external drives now, but 10GB HD movies fill up drives really fast. I'm constantly having to burn them to discs.


This would also be a good way to hide porn from the ladies.

I do plan on getting one of these and will report back, but I must stay focused as I really want that hauppauge dvr

Is this the same as buying an enclosure
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technol ... 26952.html

Pretty much, but that article is from around 2005 though.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/prod ... u=A1499069
They have them at Dell for 33
but will it work on my DVR's Fat-32 Hardrive that spins but shows blank thumbnails of 100 hours of recordings

Im not sure how that would work, since you are talking about a hard drive that is part of a dvr. Im not even sure what kind of file the movies would be on a dvr. I think comcast dvr is .ts, or at least thats how they are saved on my computer.

It's a DVD recorder with a hard drive that records in VOB-Mpeg 2
The guy i called said i can install it as a slave in the pc to recover my videos but Vista pc has connectors that are not like my XP hard drive
So i have no clue how to get them to fit

Newer pcs will have SATA interface whereas your older pc and your hard drive on your DVD recorder is IDE.

So how do i get my older Drive connected in a SATA plug?
or should i install it in my old win 98 PC but my External HD does not have a win 98 driver so i can't connect it to transfer files

I would say invest in a hard drive enclosure. They are pretty cheap and easy to install a hard drive into. Vista should have no problem. I recovered an old 80GB hard drive out of my old pc. Just installed the HD in the encloser, plug into Vista and no problems.

I finally got one of these, and I got to say it's one of the 2 best things I've purchased in a while. (This and the Hauppauge PVR)

For backing up it's great because you can get exact copies of hard drives which you obviously can't do with discs, and it takes only a fraction of the time.

It's also perfect for keeping HD movies. Blu-ray is way too expensive as a storage format and dual layer DVD's aren't enough space to store some movies. If the movies are mpeg-2 you can split them and playback in parts easily, but if it's h.264 or other formats they have to be either split archived or HJSplit then rejoined before you can play them....no fun when you just want to watch a movie.

The downside is even on sale, internal hard drives are still more expensive than discs $/GB, but I figure the time saved in burning discs is more than enough to make up for it. With all the hours saved, you can be more productive which should be able to pay for the difference.

Bottom line: I highly recommend it!

Well looks like we have yet another cool option

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... CatId=2785

its the same docking station, but with TWO slots. And the docking stations now support 2TB drives per slot...4TB wow

I will probably be getting this. Just need to find a good deal one some 2TB internal drives

I have 2 dual docks, one Thermaltake Black X and one Startech. I've had zero problems with the Black X, but the only design flaw is that you can only turn both drives on at once. Well, you could insert the drive while the switch is on, but that's a little ghetto. The Startech died on me because it kept powering on and off when I had 2 drives in. It screwed up one of my hard drives because it kept powering off and on constantly causing mft data loss. I couldn't recover any of the data. I wasn't so angry because it was just shows I recorded from Discovery Channel...can always catch reruns of those. If it were some of the stuff I worked on or downloaded I would be pissed! BTW, I got it replaced by Tiger, and the new unit has been working for a good 8 months with only the only problem being the LED on one of the slots not turning on.

Keep checking Tiger, Newegg, and Buy.com for hard drive deals. Sometimes you get instant rebates, and you may be able to get $20 or $30 off the drive you're looking for. Check daily or at least weekly.

For hard drives, I've used the Hitachi Deskstar 2TB, Seagate Barracuda 1TB, and Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB. They are all great, but since you mentioned 2TB, I'll talk about those and my experience with them. The Hitachi is a steal for a 7200RPM drive. It's fast and reliable, but it does make some noise and gets hot. The price of the WD lower then the Hitachi, but it has some drawbacks. Definitely not for use in RAID 1 or any mirroring. I wouldn't use the WD as the OS's working hard drive, but as an external it's great. Also it's quiet as can be and stays nice and cool. Make sure you get the WD20EARS not the WD20EADS if you go WD. I think the other version is crap by some of the reviews I've read.