Hi there,

In the future I will move out of the country and I can't carry on with me my desktop PC, so I just wanted to buy an external hard drive to store all my data (Pictures, videos, music) and some game's folders, then paste/transfer in a new PC.

As well, right now I want my wife to download some game clients I can't get over here (bandwidth issues) and put in this external hard drive to then send to me and copy in my PC, so I'm able to enjoy the games I can't download (TERA, TSW, GW2 etc...)

I have been reading many complains about many external hard drives where people don't like the preinstalled software in it, in most of the cases, the customer had to uninstall or format the drive. I would love to avoid this kind of stuff.

So guys, I need help to pick the right external hard drive, I use Win 7 and my USB ports are ver 2.0 able to spend right now between $70 and $120 looking in the range of 320GB to 500GB

So which are your suggestion and why? Thanks very much!

There is a lot you can do with the money you have to spend. I would say your best bet for portability would be to go with a 2.5" SATA laptop hard drive in an external enclosure. I would go with this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591) for a hard drive as it is a GREAT drive and as long as you arent going to be running the games from the external you can get this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817366030) for the enclosure, I have this enclosure and it works great. Its very simple to get the drive in it and it doesn't get hot and I can take it wherever I need it. If you DO plan to run the games from the external hard drive I would suggest getting an enclosure that hooks up to your computer via eSATA or USB 3.0 (if you have a port).

On another note make sure you are able to play these games where you are. Look around the internet and see if the games producers have an IP block for the area you will be in.

Sincerely,

          Sevens

Originally posted by WildSevens

There is a lot you can do with the money you have to spend. I would say your best bet for portability would be to go with a 2.5" SATA laptop hard drive in an external enclosure. I would go with this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591) for a hard drive as it is a GREAT drive and as long as you arent going to be running the games from the external you can get this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817366030) for the enclosure, I have this enclosure and it works great. Its very simple to get the drive in it and it doesn't get hot and I can take it wherever I need it. If you DO plan to run the games from the external hard drive I would suggest getting an enclosure that hooks up to your computer via eSATA or USB 3.0 (if you have a port).

On another note make sure you are able to play these games where you are. Look around the internet and see if the games producers have an IP block for the area you will be in.

 

Sincerely,

          Sevens

No, not running the games from it;  my plan is to transfer the files from PC to external hard drive and then to the other PC where I will run the games ( I checked already I can do this with TERA client and GW2 and both playable here) I got to play GW2 beta because a friend burned 4 DVDs xD to copy the client in my PC, just hope for a better option and that is why the external hard drive comes to the idea.

Thanks!

For what it's worth, the companies that actually make hard drives are Western Digital, Hitachi (which was bought by WD and now seems to call their products "HGST"), Seagate, Samsung (whose hard drive unit was bought by Seagate), and Toshiba (generally low end stuff).  Any product by some other company will use one of their hard drives, and add more stuff onto it.

If all you want is the external hard drive without any fancy additions to it, I'd expect the companies that actually make the hard drives to be more inclined to give that to you.  But I don't know.

Is your situation that you live in a different place from your wife, and want her to download stuff where she lives and then mail you the hard drive?  You could conceivably mail the hard drive back and ask her to download additional stuff for you later, then?  But you're not going to keep the hard drive constantly plugged in?  Or is this going to be a one time transfer of everything on your current hard drive?

If it's a one time transfer of what you have on your hard drive now, then you should know exactly how much capacity you need.  If it's just downloading and mailing some future games, then you might want to consider a USB flash drive instead.  That's cheaper to buy, and also cheaper to mail.  For example, this probably gives you about 60 GB of usable capacity for $34 with the promo code:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220674

I would just go to newegg and sort it by price and user reviews, then see which has the highest rating with the most reviews.

Originally posted by Quizzical

For what it's worth, the companies that actually make hard drives are Western Digital, Hitachi (which was bought by WD and now seems to call their products "HGST"), Seagate, Samsung (whose hard drive unit was bought by Seagate), and Toshiba (generally low end stuff).  Any product by some other company will use one of their hard drives, and add more stuff onto it.

If all you want is the external hard drive without any fancy additions to it, I'd expect the companies that actually make the hard drives to be more inclined to give that to you.  But I don't know.

Is your situation that you live in a different place from your wife, and want her to download stuff where she lives and then mail you the hard drive?  You could conceivably mail the hard drive back and ask her to download additional stuff for you later, then?  But you're not going to keep the hard drive constantly plugged in?  Or is this going to be a one time transfer of everything on your current hard drive?

If it's a one time transfer of what you have on your hard drive now, then you should know exactly how much capacity you need.  If it's just downloading and mailing some future games, then you might want to consider a USB flash drive instead.  That's cheaper to buy, and also cheaper to mail.  For example, this probably gives you about 60 GB of usable capacity for $34 with the promo code:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220674

She is in US and I'm right now in VNZ (Venezuela) and will be few months before I move with her. The thing is I'm a gamer and have limited bandwidth right now, so I was planing she get the ext. hard drive, download the game clients and then send to me.

Once here, I should just plug it and do a copy/paste or just drag the folder/files to my PC...

...And then when I have to move, just back up all my data that is approximately 300GB and take with me just with the ext. hard drive :)

Don't worry about pre-installed software - you will generally reformat the drive before use anyway. It takes up very little space on the drive if you chose to leave it on there, and you don't have to install it if you don't want to - I can't think of any USB drive that actually requires it's software before it will function (save something like the internal hard drive in an iPod or something like that).

For external, minimal use like your going to be doing, just get the least expensive drive with as much capacity as you need.

Another option is to just get a USB enclosure or dock (costs about $25-$30 US) and stick any off-the-shelf hard drive you want into it. The docks work particularly well for situations such as that, as you can swap out hard drives with no tools required.

I've done this with 2.5" drives (laptop drives) before and mailed them, using an external enclosure.

What do you think about this options I ended with:

WD My passport Essential:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-136-750

WD My Passport:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236191

Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra portable:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-148-653

Seagate GoFlex Slim:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148942


Also, I'm taking in consideration about getting a SATA hard drive in an external enclosure as you guys advices me (Hoping is easy enough).

I'm a big fan of WD passports and have a few that I use mostly for photo back-ups and archiving (I shoot RAW with an 18 MPixel camera and in a typical shooting day I can easily go through 32 GBytes of files before the initial cull) and also media files.

I love the P&P functionality and no need for separate power. The slim form factor is also nice and gives them a very pro look. I don't know about where you live but here in Canada, Costco stocks them and they are on sale more often than not.

Of course, USB transfer rates won't be as fast as SATA but I've never found that to be a problem since I'm not trying to run anything from them.

Also... for things that you will want your wife to DL and send to you after you're there... have you considered using SD cards? They are dirt cheap, easy to tape to a sheet of paper and mail in a normal letter, and come in convenient capacities: you can get 16 GB for ~ $5-8 and that's enough to store a digital DL of pretty well any MMO or other game... just a thought.

I would recommend this if you are moving from one pc to another.  It has the option to put your files onto an external hd.  It also saves registry settings.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/features/windows-easy-transfer

Originally posted by Iselin

...

 

Also... for things that you will want your wife to DL and send to you after you're there... have you considered using SD cards? They are dirt cheap, easy to tape to a sheet of paper and mail in a normal letter, and come in convenient capacities: you can get 16 GB for ~ $5-8 and that's enough to store a digital DL of pretty well any MMO or other game... just a thought.

 

I didn't though about SD cards, I'll check about it, thanks!

Originally posted by waynejr2

I would recommend this if you are moving from one pc to another.  It has the option to put your files onto an external hd.  It also saves registry settings.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/features/windows-easy-transfer

Good advice, thanks!

Originally posted by Dragviper

What do you think about this options I ended with:

WD My passport Essential:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-136-750

WD My Passport:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236191

Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra portable:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-148-653

Seagate GoFlex Slim:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148942


Also, I'm taking in consideration about getting a SATA hard drive in an external enclosure as you guys advices me (Hoping is easy enough).

I think any of those will work well for you.  If you want to take your entire hard drive contents, without taking the computer with you, then you do need a ~500 GB hard drive, not a smaller flash drive.

Thank guys!