bobmallet1

What do you guys use external hard drives for in college? How common are they? Can you store ripped DVDs on them? Should a college student use a portable external hard drive or a regular external hard drive?

Coopjust

1) N/A, not in college yet
2) Same, so I don't know. My older sibling has one (I bought a custom enclosure and put a drive in for him.
3) Yeah, anything you can store on a regular hard drive can be stored externally, provided that it fits (duh). This includes DVDs.
4) The regular hard drive would be a much better value. More GB/$. It would require a power plug though. The portable one would be nice, but not worth the price premium in my opinion. If you really need it, you can get one, but they're much more expensive for the amount of storage you get and are much more fragile.

If you're going to store DVDs, you're going to fill up the portable one in a few days.

Pearlinthemist

I have a 500gb external that I use as a backup & storage drive for my pictures/music/movies/important school documents. After you loose an important file... you'll be glad you have multiple copies of everything. I only paid $100 for it a few months ago.

Any external hard drive is "portable", it's just a matter of how large it is & how often you're really going to be carrying it around. No sense in paying more for the little small ones.

UriA702

Look for one thats USB powered, so you can use it while moving around without having an extra outlet available.

lixuelai

Those will be expensive though for the capacity you get since they are all notebook drives inside. Iv got a 750GB and a 250GB external for anime I store. Works pretty well. For portability a flash drive is more than enough most of the time. Try to get a Firewire/USB combo one. Firewire is better for external hard drive than USB. Esata is best however it is limited to desktops.

BP-TheGuy88

i beg to differ. depends what Firewire connection you're using unless its Firewire 800 (1394b) or higher than there's no way you want Firewire over USB 2.0.

lixuelai

FireWire - USB Comparison

Just because USB 2.0 has a higher throughput than Firewire (400 which is the most common) does not mean it is faster.

viscious

What I do is I have a 250GB external hard drive (non portable) connected to my iMac with an SSH server on so I have access to everything on the iMac (which I use as my main computer) from wherever my laptop is. Since its straight through the college network the connection is pretty fast and I've had no problems with it.

rocketman08

USB 2.0 has an advertised bandwidth of 480 Mbit/sec

Firewire has an advertised bandwidths between 400-3200 Mbit/sec (depending on setup)

However, both of these speeds are faster than the typical read/write speed of a hard disk so it really makes no difference. It's a bit like someone upgrading to gigabit ethernet for their internet connection when their cable modem is only 3 megabit... it ain't gonna get any faster. The properties of the hard disk itself will have much more impact on the speed of the setup.

kkei08

Buy a regular internal hard drive (cheaper), a molex power cable, and a usb->pci board (i believe that's what it's called) and make your own external for cheap.

Google it...I made my own a while back and it's really cheap.