Looking for opinions on Hard Drives (and storage in general)

[guy]

On the point of External HDD (Internal HDD preassembled with an enclosure), I personally stay away from those.
You don't know what type of HDD they've put into the External one.

Agreed.

Additionally, while you can sometimes find out what drive is inside, manufactures will change their warranty terms simply because of how the drives are pre-packaged. Case in point: Western Digital MyBook (3.5") and Passport (2.5") pre-packaged external drives, which use WD Caviar and Scorpio internal drives that are available separately as internal bare drives. The difference however is that the internal bare drives come with a full 3 year warranty, while the pre-packaged external drives have limited 1-3 year warranties -- even though the physical drives are the exact same.

When the WD Passport drives first came out, they were being sold noticably cheaper than the internal bare drives. People found out quickly that the actual drives were the exact same and started buying the external drives and gutting them (to upgrade their laptop hdds) -- only to be dismayed later when they were left without warranties.

 

[example100000]

i have an internal 500gb seagate hdd, 320gb imation external, 160gb wd external, 120gb (dont know what the hell cheap brand) external and a 160gb ipod i use to keep my JI stuff. i dont like backing up things onto cds because they take a long time to copy and have small storage. i'd always prefer a external hdd than a bluray coz blurays are very expensive and...dont store that much. now with hd media players, u can now just plug in a hdd and play stuff straight off it...so why use cds/blurays anymore? and...i like pancakes and butter and not so much on the waffles

 

[porkar]

Does anyone have any recommendation or experience of Solid State drives?

 

[guy]

Does anyone have any recommendation or experience of Solid State drives?

If you are limited to SATA-II (3gbps) and are using it primarily as a boot drive (OS files), any first-generation SandForce (SF-1200 series) drives will be fine. If you have SATA-III (6gbps), go for either the newere second-generation SandForce (SF-2500 series) drives as they become available if you are using it as a boot/OS drive; or the RealSSD C300 drives if you will be handling lots of compressed data (MP3s, H.264, etc).

If you need additional information on why those are good choices, do a simple search for any of the hundreds of reviews. If you have a specific question about any of the drives, feel free to ask.