Think it's about time I got a back up drive, to back up files. MP3's, pics etc from my household PC's, just in case a disk fails or OS corrupts, etc...

Mate of mine has a spare 60gb drive (normal 3.5" IDE internal drive) which he might let me have for £30....

Whats a good USB 2.0 enclosure to fit it into?

Do They need to be powered? (guessing they do)

Do they need to have a fan inside the case?

What sort of price should I be paying for an enclosure, with PSU, cable etc?

Can I buy one on ebay? Or is that a no no (cue Dan )

 

Thrush,

3.5" will need external power, only laptop drives (2.5") can be powered off the USB port and even then, I've seen 80Gb ones not power up properly.

But, £30 for a 60Gb drive
You can get a hell of a lot more for that money, £60/70 will get you close to 250/300Gb iirc

And what good is a 60Gb when you have 300Gb of porn to backup You're going to spend months trying to figure out which movies you REALLY want to keep.

This one, no that one, ah, but this one's quite cool, etc............

Try Dabs or eBuyer for a case, I can't think of anything to look for specifically

 

Holy fook, you're right!?!?!?! I just looked on Ebuyer - a 120gb drive costs £40-odd

Fooking prices have come down since I last bought a drive - I paid £30 for my 80gb drive last year!!!!

The slave drive in my PC is an 80gb drive, but I am only using 25gb on it so far, my main drive is using 44gb (out of 60) but then, I do have a 60% back up of my slave drive on there also...

My family pc has a 40gb drive and is currently at abotu 30gb used, but I suppose when you strip that down to mp3's, doc's, files and pics, it's probably only 20gb....

so 20+25+10 = 55gb roughly that needs to be backed up, so might be better off with an 80gb drive, possibly a 100gb drive....

Thing is, since it won't be used a lot, I don't wanna pay a premium for it (plus, I am poor )

Ideally, if I could get say, 80 or 100gb drive plus an enclosure and relevent PSU's, cables etc for abotu £50 that'd be about right....

 

You may as well stick 2 larger drives in there and backup what's required. I have 4 hard drives in my system at the mo, 2 x 120's and 2 x 160's. I also have 2 spare 40 gig drives, and 2 spare 60 gig drives. I did run 6 drives before but moved to bigger ones for the storage purposes. I'm next looking at a bigger case with lot's of drive bays and filling it with hard drives

 

Dan - my PC (and my downstairs PC) both run on standard IDE cables, and only have the one slave connector, and I don't know how you run more than two HDD's in a PC anyway lol....

But I use my secondary/slave drive for all my MP3's, vids, movies, pics etc, and the main drive (C for the OS, and all the programmes and system files...

But, if my slave drive goes tits up and fails, I will lose all my shit - not good!

My downstairs PC only has one drive, and my old dear probably ain't interested in sticking another drive in it (she don't understand all this PC malarky) The main drive is a 40gb drive, and I checked it last night - it's only using 15.5gb anyway...

So all I was thinking was getting a largish drive to whack in a USB enclosure, back up what is needed off both PC's, and then just keep it in a draw - as in it won't be used unless I need to recover the date from a damaged drive etc...

How long can you keep data on a HDD without it being plugged into a PSU?

 

For ever Well certainly longer than you'd ever want to

 

Sorted then Wasn't exactly sure if it needed power the majority of the time or not

Just gotta decide how much space I want/need..... With 120gb drives costing £40-£45 now a 60gb drives gotta be worth £20 right? So could I get a fully set up enclosure, with plug'n'play USB 2.0, psu, cables etc, ready to rock for less than £30? I know I can from ebay of course, just wondered about shops....

 

Like this?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/3-5-HDD-HARD-D...QQcmdZViewItem

Just add a normal IDE drive right?

 

The eBay item would be perfect yes

 

Good price?

 

Depends how much the bidding ends at

Have a look on ebuyer or dabs.com for similar items and see how far you should be bidding for one

£9.99 for postage is a bit steep though

 

Yeah, but cheaper than getting one from China

I looked on Ebuyer, but they NEVER make it easy to find what it is you are looking for

 

I've got a PCI IDE controller, which has 2 x IDE ports on it, allowing 2 drives on each .

You can run 4 drives off the motherboard, so, 1 master, slave on IDE 1, 1 x DVD burner and another hard drive on ide 2 would give you 3. One for Windows, and 2 for sotrage.

Or, maybe something like this ?

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=80599

 

Dan - did you mean you can run THREE drives of the mobo, as your next sentence only lists three, not four....

I get what you are saying about the PCI IDE controller tho All makes sense now

 

Well, my friend at work just gave me his 60gb drive

So all I need now is the enclosure, PSU, and cables, and am bidding on one on ebay...

Last question - would I be right in guessing that even with USB 2.0, file transfer from one internal IDE drive to the USB drive is gonna be slower than internal IDE to internal IDE (slave)? If so, how much slower are we talking?

 

Depends what you are transferring m8 really

 

Typical stuff really : music, video clips, word docs, pics, etc...

 

Yay! Me enclosure arrived today! Just put it together and plugged it in - seems to work fine!



Transfer rate after one test seems to be okay. I copied a folder full of Prgramme and EXE files. 44 objects (mix of installers, .EXE's and RAR/ZIP files) total 369mb and that transferred in about 30 secs.

Anyone tell me what speed that transfer rate is please?

 

369/30 = 12.3 mb / sec

 

Is that good then? Is that about right for USB 2.0?

(I don't actually know if my PC has USB 2.0 )