External (Portable) HDD recommendation

[danny_w]

Hi all,
My son will be entering college this fall (SCAD in Savannah) and they have suggested that he bring an external hard drive to transport his projects between labs and his computer. I was thinking that one of the newer 2.5" bus-powered drives would be perfect for this. Capacity is usually not all that high in this type of drive, and prices are high per gig, but portability is enhanced by the small size and not having to carry a power supply. He could always have a bigger hard drive back in his room. Does anybody have any specific recommendations of drives they have used and how well they work? He will probably be taking a mini with him the first year, so the interface would be FW400 (although an additional FW800 would be OK for future expansion too). Thanks.

 

[iGary]

iPod.

 

[skp574]

What capacity does he need?

If it's gigabytes then an iPod would be the obvious choice. Just set aside some space for disk use.

If it's going to be around a gig, then how about a USB memory key? I use these to transfer documents and pictures. It fits on your keys in your pocket. It can't play music though, . Or an iPod Shuffle, then you will get music! But more importantly, if it's going to be carted around a lot, it has no moving parts. If it lost, damaged they are not expensive to replace.

Hope that helps.

 

[After G]

The other posters on here have some good advice if your son doesn't need that much capacity. It sounds like an iPod or an iPod Shuffle should be fine in most cases. If however, he needs a massive amount of storage, I would recommend getting an external hard drive case and a hard drive. I ended up getting a Venus DS3 and a 300 GB Maxtor drive for storage. Works great for me, though it does need an outlet. It cost me something like $200 though, but it was a lot cheaper than buying a premade one, and I paid around $50 for the Venus case.

 

[danny_w]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will have to figure out houw much data we are talking about here, because I really have no idea at the moment. If a 1GB memory stick would do this would be great, but I don't know. I really had not thought about an iPod, but this would not be my first choice because of the fragility of the units. There have been numerous cautions from users about this kind of use, even though Apple does seem to advertise the capability.