[dariuzthepole]

Hi All,

I'm looking for some advice. I'm planning on purchasing an external HDD, however I cannot decide between NAS or portable HDD.

When researching NAS HDDs, I found the Western Digital My Book World Edition to be the most suitable for me. However I have read the software is clumsy and the drive itself is not the most reliable. I have seen the price of these come down sharply recently, with a 2TB now available at a reasonable price. However if the remote access facility is not reliable then it defeats the purpose of itself.

With regards to portable HDDs, I guess the only drawback in comparison to HDDs is for a similar price you are getting a reduced capacity - largest portable HDD capacity I have seen is 500GB.

THen there are also Media Drives, which to be honest I do not know a lot about.

I think I am slightly leaning towards the portable option at present. But I keep thinking I can get 4x the capacity for a fraction more.

I currently have a Maxtor 3200 500GB Desktop HDD. As I have never used either a portable or NAS HDD I am struggling to decide on which. I currently am using nearly 200GB of my 500GB capacity so I think 500GB should be ok for the foreseeable future. However as I mentioned above, I believe this is the largest capacity available in portable formats.

Any help & advice you could give me would be most beneficial!

Thanks,

dariuzthepole

[Carbon]

If it's an option I would just buy large capacity internals, and a motherboard to support them if you don't have enough SATA/IDE. Cheaper, less hassle, better GB/$.

If you want higher cap for cheap, just slap some internals into enclosures. I'm not sure what your goals are here: NAS and external HDDs are sort of on opposite ends of the portability spectrum, so if you went into a little more detail as to why those are your options and how the computer is set up that might help.

[dariuzthepole]

Originally Posted by Carbon

If it's an option I would just buy large capacity internals, and a motherboard to support them if you don't have enough SATA/IDE. Cheaper, less hassle, better GB/$.

If you want higher cap for cheap, just slap some internals into enclosures. I'm not sure what your goals are here: NAS and external HDDs are sort of on opposite ends of the portability spectrum, so if you went into a little more detail as to why those are your options and how the computer is set up that might help.

My hardware knowledge starts to go fuzzy as soon as youo mention internals! My current internal HDD is only 74Gb, so that could be upgraded. I am also planning to refurbish my laptop a bit as it is now 3yrs old. Planning to up the RAM to 2Gb and re-install Windows to clear it out good & proper.

The majority of the data being stored is primarily media (MP3s, MP4s, AVIs etc), hence why I slipped in Media Drives in the original article.

I have thought of using enclosures however I'm not 100% confident pulling drives in & out as I've not done this before.

[Carbon]

Do you know the motherboard in your current computer? IDE allows at least 2 drives per cable, and most older motherboards have multiple. SATA is even easier, but if you aren't comfortable with that, enclosures are pretty easy too. The main difference will be speed - USB is very, very slow. This probably won't matter too much with mp3 files, but if you try to stream 720p or higher video off the thing, especially over the LAN, you might run into some serious buffering issues. NAS is fine for this, but like you said a lot of them, especially the WD ones, have reliability issues and the software is horrid.

Regardless of how you plug them in: for the actual drives themselves, Seagate will be coming out with some really fast 1TB drives late this month. Current 1TB drives are OK but these are dual platter which means less chance of failure, better power efficiency, and faster. Either way, a couple of 1TB drives plugged into enclosures and connected to your computer via USB can be networked (assuming the laptop uses the same LAN) so that you can access them from the laptop as well.

So my suggestion would be doing just that to get more capacity (and frankly reliability) for your money.

[serverguy]

I think he said he has a laptop.. so internals are not really much use.

For a laptop, I would think a NAS would actually be pretty good, with a decent wireless N network to go with it.

Then, you have access to all your files, without having to drag a EHD around with your everywhere. I think that sounds like a good plan :)

How much money are you looking to spend?


Edit: Oops I read it wrong, he has a desktop and a laptop.

Again I still think NAS would be better, as then you don't have to have the desktop on when you want to watch a movie on the laptop, and from experience the convenience is just, well.. very convenient being able to get at your storage from any device.

[Carbon]

Ah, see I'm used to keeping mine all day so I completely forgot you can't access it while it's dead.