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[jonny162]

Hi,

I'm looking for an external USB 2 hard drive that is fast enough to stream music/video to a host media center.  Requirements:

1. USB 2
2. 500GB/1TB
3. Ideally quiet
4. US$200 or less
5. I'm not interested in bundled software

Thanks in advance!

Jonny

[Mr ChriZ]

Any of the 3.5" drives should be more than fast enough.
I hold my collection on a 1TB MyBook drive. It's the quietest external drive I've had yet.
I'm looking to move it onto a passport drive soon, now they've come out with a 1TB 2.5" drive, and use the MyBook as a backup.

[benn600]

You can go for a 10K or 15K RPM drive if you do need more speed beyond the typical drives.  I personally go for RAID configurations first because they can offer greatly improved performance in addition to redundancy, which is key to media files that are often not able to be backed up (due to sheer size).

[newsposter]

I believe that the title of the thread includes the word 'external' as well as 'usb'.

Because of the speed/latency limitations of USB, you can go with a 5400 or even 4500 rpm drive.  Find one that carries a decent warranty, runs cool, and runs quiet.

Ben does point out the backup issue.  You have to consider any external/portable drive as vulnerable.

[jonny162]

Awesome responses everyone thanks very much!

I agree that the data loss potential of have all my media on a single volume is great.  In that case can anyone recommend any good RAID external drives? 

I've read about the MyBook Studio 2: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=621http://

These products often come with bundled backup software that I'm really not interested in however, so if there are alternatives that lose these and cost a little less that would be great!

Has anyone built their own RAID configured setup, and if so, do you have any advice?

Cheers,

Jonny

[benn600]

For a while you couldn't get 1TB without it being two drives in one.  So it's double size, but if offers redundancy RAID1 -- or RAID0, which reduces reliability...

Plus, eSATA would allow what I described (10K or 15K RPM drives) to be valid and actually helpful externally.  That is a great choice if you have the option.

[jonny162]

Ok so RAID1 sounds like a good idea.  Do I really need a 10k to 15k rpm hard disk to stream media?  I'm not hugely bothered by the write speed but would like to stream hi-def video directly from the drive if possible?

Do you have any specific recommendations?  Is the My Book Studio Edition II 2GB at US$329 a good price?  Is building a RAID drive myself worth the effort and cost saving?  I'm a real beginner with this stuff as you might have guessed...

Thanks

[benn600]

The fact that you're asking prompted me to suggest something above average.  Generally speaking, there is nothing to worry about with any desktop sized drive.  Laptop drives can be slower and might give you trouble.

What operating system are you running?  Some offer built in software RAID, which may be sufficient because RAID1 does not require parity calculations which RAID5 or RAID6 do, both of which would likely require a hardware raid card.

[jonny162]

Well right now I don't have a media center (I'm gearing up to build my own or buy something like a fit-pc2).  I imagine this would run WinXP.  My laptop is running Windows7RC.

What I'm looking to do right now is burn all my CD's and DVD's to a medium that is backed up, then sell them.  On-going I buy media online through my laptop and plan to copy media from the laptop to the storage device.  I guess a software RAID would do the business?  If so would I simply buy two external drives and setup Windows appropriately?

[newsposter]

Jonny, look at this compact case;

http://www.apextechusa.com/products.asp?pID=144

I've used this case for the last couple of machines.  Nice and quiet.  The street price is about $75 at the local computer store.  Might be available cheaper on-line.

You can fit a mATX board, DVD drive, and a pair of 3.5" disk drives into the case.

The 'biggest' machine I've built using this case has an Intel DG45ID mobo, a C2D E6850 (running at 3gz!), low profile CPU cooler/fan, 4 Gb ram, a pair of 200Gb hard drives in Raid1, and a DVD-DL +- RW drive.

I've probably pushed the 275 watt power budget to the edge, but after 6 months the machine is still humming (quietly) along.

The primary air intake goes though the power supply and is exhausted by a case fan.  There is room above the mobo I/O plate to mount a pair of 30/40mm fans to pull more air directly into the case (and across the cpu cooler and ram sticks).  However even with the E6850 cpu I have never had any temp alarms.  Things seem to hum along at 36-39 degrees C.

That DG45ID board is quite nice in terms of video and audio capabilities as well as on-board RAID 0/1/5.  You could even run a $40- Celeron Dual Core (running at about 1.8 Mz) as I am doing on two machines) and still have a very nice PC with decent response.