External Drives

[Jonathan Duncan]

On Thu, 25 May 2006, Hans Fugal wrote:

> It's time to play the hardware advice game again.
>
> I'm out of disk space. On my laptop, on my workstation, everywhere I
> turn. I'm too poor/cheap to go get a huge drive for the workstation. I'm
> definitely too poor/cheap to replace the drive in my laptop. So I'm
> thinking an external drive might be the way to go.
>
> Here's my criteria, in order of importance:
>
> - Price. Did I mention I'm cheap?
> - Decent speed, not necessarily bleeding edge high performance, but I
>  will be compiling copious amounts of code on it daily.
> - Decent size. 10G would be plenty, 40G+ would be niiice
> - USB 2.0, because my workstation doesn't have firewire
>
> Powered through the usb port would be nice, if it's reliable.
>
> I thought this would be an easy thing to decide, but there seem to be a
> lot more factors at play, upon closer inspection. Disk speed, transfer
> rates, power issues, etc. So do any of you have
> recommendations/warnings?
>
>

I bought myself a 300GB external Maxtor Shared Storage drive.  It has an 
ethernet port on is and anyone on my network can access it.  I setup user 
accounts on it and use it to backup my hard drive.  It uses samba so I 
just mount it in my OSX and use rsync to backup what I need.  Very nice. 
I paid about $300 for it a year ago and just recently saw that it was down 
to about $150.  Makes me crazy how fast prices drop.  Anyway, this does 
not really fit your criteria, but perhaps it will give you more ideas.

Jonathan