help me spend money

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fat_fleet

fat_fleet

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looking for a good portable external hard drive to back up my digital music and other things. optimally it would a) be read/writable by both mac and pc b) hold at least 500GB c) not have *any* software attached to it... would like to manually transfer w/ drag+drop, and d) be USB-powered. i do not want to have to plug this in.

bought this guy today but will probably return it tomorrow as it only works with PC. not only that but it launches unwanted software immediately upon being plugged in and (more importantly) i spotted it on ebay for $70 less than what i paid.

thinking about going with this guy next. any satisfied or unsatisfied customers out there? anyone know if it fits my 4 criteria above?

please feel free to fire away with other suggestions. i also like things that are sleek and compact, just so ya know.


also, this is a few months down the road, but i'm looking for a stand-alone PC to almost exclusively run recording/music-editing software. these are pretty inexpensive and seem to have enormous capacities. is there something i should be looking at other than GBs? i know next to nothing about processors, sound chips, and stuff like that. please advise. thx.
 
USB powered might be a stretch IMO. A docking station and a SATA drive is cheaper IMO. $50 station, $100 1TB HDD. And that's off the shelf prices at best buy. A little clunky, but you don't really want to lug an HDD around anyway. They're fragile and the vibrations of bumping around in the trunk can kill a drive.

If you really need a mobile solution, then an SDHC card and card reader can solve a few of those issues. Not quite the specified capacity (yet), but no moving parts so a little bumping around isn't going to kill them.

I'm not a fan of WD or HP. Not that Seagates record is spotless. But I trust those a little more. And many other questionable manufacturers. I still think several SDHC cards are probably a more reliable solution for usb powered and mobile. In either case, the USB drive is going to be about 1/3rd the speed of what they would be on a different bus. So not really ideal, except to hold samples / portfolio stuff / installation / backup / or whatever you need that much capacity for.
 
Here's what I did:

I bought an external hard drive enclosure off of eBay for about $20.

Then I started collecting free hard drives - I must have 20.

Constantly I find free pc and Mac's, and the hard drives from all of them work all work - that's what I was surprised to find. Most computers from the last 15 years will have a hard drive that works.

So instead of having one 500GB unit that if it fails I'm screwed, I have a bunch of 10,20, 40 and 80 GB drives. You can have duplicates!

I don't even mount them in the enclosure - I just plug them in the parts that come with it, and when I'm done I label them with tape and put them in zip lock bags.

It's all part of my "save every cent on anything because there's some stuff like Neumanns, old K's and land that you can't get cheap" way of life.
 
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