• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

More Storage...Internal, External, or NAS?

W

Wipeout

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2002
Messages
271
So, I know I'm going to need to add some more storage to my desktop in the not too distant future, but I thought I'd ask the Disk Wizards here for advice. I use my desktop as my main workstation - it's where I do my school work, my photo processing, my gaming, everything. I have an old IBM T20 for when I'm on the go, but my desktop sees 90% of the action. I currently have a 160 GB drive. that's it. It has everything - games, programs, Windows, photos, etc., etc., etc. I also have a Maxtor OneTouch USB2 External (120 GB) that I use as a backup drive (I owned a few deathstars, that taught me the importance of backups in a big way...nothing worse than moving to college your freshman year, setting up your desktop, and having the OS drive FUBAR). The way I see it, I can do one of three things: I can buy a nice, big SATA drive (I'm running PATA right now) and dump photos and such on that; keeping them away from my OS in case it decides to dump on me. I can get more external drives, but I don't really like that idea. Idea three is to get a NAS solution like the Maxtor 300GB one and use that for backup while using the 120 GB USB2 drive as my photo location.

Opinions? I'm leaning towards the SATA route myself, but I want to hear what y'all think. I don't think that I can justify a NAS quite yet, though it could be useful when I graduate and move into a house at the end of the school year. Plus, I wanted to see what drives you might suggest - the bigger the better, but I'd like to stay under $200 if possible.
 
If you had multiple PCs around the house that needed to access shared data, then the NAS would be fore you. Or if you wanted to bring an external along with your laptop, then the external would be a good solution (although I would recommend buying an enclosure and a regular internal hard drive. Cheaper that way ;) ). But in your case, it seems like an internal SATA drive is the way to go.
You can get 200gb Maxtor DM10s for about $120 each in the SATA and 16mb cache version, which is what you want. The 300gb will bump you up to $150. You won't find a single 400gb drive under $220-ish
 
Thanks. Those Newegg pricings (too busy at work to actually check them right this sec...)?

Other opinions?
 
In the hot deals sub-forum there is a $69 200Gb 8mb Maxtor P-ATA ($79 B&M).
Two of those would get you 400Gb for $138. Thats a pretty damn good bang to buck ratio :D .

You could always buy an enclosure and toss one in that and leave the other in your main box if you needed mobile storage. S-ATA is nice but its not like the performance difference is great enough to warrant shutting the door on P-ATA just yet IMO... especially at that price!

edited for price
 
dirtydr said:
S-ATA is nice but its not like the performance difference is great enough to warrant shutting the door on P-ATA just yet IMO... especially at that
Click to expand...
What performance difference?
 
Vertigo Acid said:
What performance difference?
Click to expand...

Exactly! A few percentage points more on certain benchmarks translate to minimal if any real world difference.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top