roberth Wrote:Well, if you only have USB ports, go for the maxtor

If you have firewire or eSATA go for the WD one, since youll get way better speeds

i concur. or you could be a cheapskate and buy a drive enclosure such as this: iStarUSA eSATA external drive anclosure

+ this: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB 7200rpm SATA

Combine the two and you have a pretty good combo for $117-ish.


On the other hand, I have first hand experience with the Maxtor. I'm currently doing a music technology A-level. In the main studio wee have this big donkey workstation for general recording and mastering. Every afternoon all of our work is backed up onto a maxtor one-touch exactly the same as the one you mentioned. Well, one afternoon I was plugging it in, I turned it on, XP recognised its existence and then proceeded to turn off immediatly. Confuzzled i tried to turn the computer back on but it simply wouldn't. I unplugged the drive and the computer still wouldnt turn on at all. not a peep. I went and got the teacher who had a quick look and couldn't see anything obviously wrong, so he went and got the toolbox out the cupboard and gave me a few screwdrivers so i could do a little digging inside the beast.

It turned out the video card and one of the RAM sticks had decided to die 5 seconds after i plugged in the drive. To  be sure wee plugged the drive into an old, unused computer and that did exactly the same thing, except the motherboard went pop too. It might just have been a dodgy drive but I'm glad the workstation's hard drives (RAID 0 2TB array, made up of 2x1tb barracudas identical to the one i suggested + a backup/scratch drive. oooohhhhh....) are still intact.

The workstation is now running on onboard graphics meaning wee only have one monitor and now only half the RAM (1gb instead of 2) but other than that it seems to be ok. Wee have 3 new laptops coming on tuesday next week. (not sure of spec but I've heard that the cost in excess of £700 each. and because they're being bought by the school they don't have to pay VAT) along with a new video card, new RAM and a new external drive for the workstation. Its about time wee had some new computers. The current laptops are old FujitsuSiemens Lifebooks with a 1.2ghz Celeron and 256mb of RAM. Try running a 16 MIDI + 16 Audio track Cubase project on that!