I'm looking into getting an external HD for backup so I can reformat.
What brands would yall recomend?

Buy an internal HD, then buy an external case, then hook them up.

It would be cheaper.

I'm a Western Digital person myself, although Seagate Products are perfectly decent.  Avoid Hitachi.

Quote (Pumpkin @ April 08 2006, 3:53 pm)

Buy an internal HD, then buy an external case, then hook them up. It would be cheaper.

Exactly. I saved $100 bucks doing it this way.

For hard drives, I prefer Western Digital myself, but you can't really go wrong with a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive.

Whatever brand you choose, make sure the HD has atleast an 8mb cache.

Quote (Pumpkin @ April 08 2006, 2:53 pm)

Buy an internal HD, then buy an external case, then hook them up. It would be cheaper.

I wasn't aware that was possible.
Could you explaine a bit more?

When I upgraded to some higher capacity hard drives last year, I had two 80gigs left laying around.  I figured I should get some use out of them, so I went online and found the cheapest site that sold HD enclocures.

You connect the HD to the power out and USB cable inside the enclosure, the connections are basically the same as what you would do inside your computer, except you now have a power brick to plug into the wall to juice it up, and you run the USB(assuming you go for USB) to your computer.  I am not sure how fast a setup like this is to a 'professional' version, but for just extra storage space, speed of a few percentage points shouldn't really matter.

I have all my MP3s organized on my hard drive with itunes, every song containing album covers. If I were to transfer the folder full of songs to an external hard drive, would all of the album covers and mp3 information transfer with it? I'd hate to go through the #### of organizing every mp3 on my hard drive again.

^^^ You mean there's no folder tree with iTunes?  

Quote (Mr. B @ April 09 2006, 2:43 pm)

^^^ You mean there's no folder tree with iTunes?

I use Itunes as well and you would be supprise how stupid it can be sometimes.