On Friday 09 January 2009, Adam wrote: > I hope Wednesday's dinner went well -- sorry I couldn't make it.
In Middletown we had a lot of ice buildup from freezing rain, and then the power went out for a while, but thankfully came back. Probably issues with ice buildup on power lines. > Thanks, everybody, for all your suggestions and advice on a 1 TB > USB HD. Portability is a consideration, so I'd rather go with a > USB drive than a networked one. There's one more thing to consider. A USB HD must be mounted in order to use it, where the network drive does not (although you can). This means you have to remember to unmount the USB drive before disconnecting it, or you'll get some filesystem corruption. Also, I only have USB 1.1 on my Desktop because it's old, so although getting a USB 2.0 portable drive would function, it would be much slower than a network drive would be for me. In other words -- check that you really have USB 2.0. ;-) On the flip-side the of the coin, the network drives tend to be just slightly slower in terms of file access compared with USB 2.0. My friend's Maxtor Gig-E network drive (with Seagate disks) generally transfers at about 14 MB/sec, but it's fast enough for what we use it for. [No need to quote the model because I don't think the model is current anymore -- I looked, and it's not on NewEgg.] But naturally because there's an embedded computer, the network drives are a bit more expensive than USB drives. Portability isn't really an issue with a network drive -- they're basically a similar size as a USB case except there's a tiny embedded computer in there, and access on Linux via a SMB:// type URL is pretty easy, which I think works on both KDE and Gnome [but not in Firefox], and the drive works well between Windows users and Linux users on the network at the same time. Since you'll likely only be using this for personal storage and not between other people, all of this probably doesn't matter except for the "must remember to unmount" thing. > Also, I'm not sure I know enough > yet to be able to choose an external case that's compatible with > any particular drive, so I think I'll go with one already enclosed. > Right now I'm considering a Fantom GD1000EU ( > http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204079 ) > which is $130 with a 2 year warranty, and can report on my > experiences with it if anyone's interested. > > Adam Looks like a good choice, it's gotten lots of reviews and most are positive. In situations like that I'd recommend reading only the negative reviews to see what the rare horror stories are. The specs look fine. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Jan 7 - Ruby on Rails Feb 4 - TBD
