[X-Newbies] External hard drive

[Robert MacLeay]

Whether a super-cheap drive like this is a good idea for you depends on your
usage habits.  

The only way to build a drive of this capacity and price is to cut corners
everywhere, so many corners that you may want to invest in some duct tape to
make sure the drive doesn't roll off your desk.

This is not to say that, if you don't demand much of it, it will not meet
your needs. If you intend to use it as a backup drive, powering it up and
connecting to your eMac for an hour or two once a week, it will probably be
adequate.


If, on the other hand, you want to expand the storage of your eMac and have
it connected all the time, you will find that:
a) Drives generate heat, and heat degrades the reliability and accelerates
the death of all electrical components. Cheap drive cases do not have
cooling fans; good ones do, and their drives last longer because of it.
b) Good cables are absurdly expensive, but it is possible to make cheap
cables that still carry an electrical signal, just not well. This translates
to slower throughput (resending data again and again because the transfer
fails verification, if you are lucky enough to be verifying data transfers),
inferior physical construction (i.e., easier to break) and again, shorter
life.
c) Check any vendor who caries multiple lines of raw hard disks and you will
see that drives of the same physical capacity can have substantially
different prices. Quality costs; the drives with 5 year warranties will be
made with higher quality wearing components, like drive bearings. They will
work better, cooler, and longer. And cost more. Remember my remark about
cutting corners? Where do you think the factory seconds wind up? Not the
seconds of the good drives, the seconds of the cheapest ones.

Nobody wants to be told to spend $50-$75 extra on a component which has
mostly the same specifications, but, in the long run, there is no such thing
as a free lunch. Just understand what it is you are buying.


On 12/17/06 9:34 AM, "Robert Green" <greenrw at shaw.ca> wrote:

> I am running out of space on my G4 emac and am looking for an
> external hard drive. My machine currently has 75 GB and is running
> 10.4.8. Does anyone know anything about the 250GB  apple firewire/usb
> drives sold by Afterthemac on ebay that sell for about $100.00. Any
> suggestions, recommendations.
> Thanks.