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• Data dumping ground: external hard drives

Data dumping ground: external hard drives

By Felisa Yang, CNET.com on 27 April 2005

Gone are the days of picking and choosing what to keep and what to get rid of. With hundreds of gigabytes of storage in a compact external hard drive, you can keep it all and deal with it at your leisure.

Not all external hard disk drives are created equal, though. The simplest (and least expensive) plug right into your PC via USB or FireWire connectors. Network-attached options let you share the space with others, so you can all access the same movies and digital photos. Buffalo's LinkStation even includes a print server, so all the machines in your home can use the same printer. Whatever you choose, you'll be hard-pressed to fill up all that space.

Buffalo LinkStation (120GB) Read review Buffalo's LinkStation is a great low-cost solution for adding storage and a print server to a home or small-business network. Maxtor OneTouch II (300GB) Read review Maxtor's OneTouch II external hard drive makes a good thing even better, with 250GB to 300GB's worth of one-button backups, but be warned: it eliminates any excuses for not backing up a computer. LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface (250GB) Read review Stylish FireWire 800 performance that's as cheap as the slower mainstream competition. Maxtor Shared Storage Drive (300GB) Read review Maxtor's Shared Storage Drive is great, especially for those unfamiliar with networking. Geeks should also consider the Buffalo LinkStation.

Topics: data, disk, hard, drive, buffalo, lacie, maxtor, external, review, read

• Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (160GB)

• Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus (500GB)

• Toshiba USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive

• LaCie Biggest FW800

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  ShaneST commented on 04/12/2007 21:39 Report abuse

  You should warn readers, what happens after <6 mths when the 500GB Maxtor fails to read & you take it to a recovery date specialise who quotes $550 for an assessment but given the problem identified, it will cost up to $2,500 to recover your data: 1,000 of photos (many not backed up due to size) & also my own 7 day 140GB backups to my home business machine...all now lost because of misplaced faith in these external drives. It wasn;t dropped, we had top of the range power conditioner (no power surge) & no apparent reason for what happend other than drive failure (must have been a Firday made drive!). I have leant a valuable lesson.... have a bank of these backing up one another or have copies of everyhting everywhere. Frnakly I am disallutioned with the technology..it it the capacity or the enginerring causing the problem..I do not know. Plse increase your warning notice for other unsuspecting consumers