external hard drives

Sephiroth_dude

hey

I have a dell xps m1710,my hard drive is 120gd (although in the system thing its says 105gd capacity ) well basically I only have 29 gds or so left (29 % I think or somthing) and i want to buy an external hard drive and I just want to know are they reliable?I play alot of games so thats what I would want it for.Are they good for saving games or installing games on them?

I have about 8 games on my hard drive along with a lot of pictures and music so im guessing thats why its so low,im playing all 8 games so uninstall them at the moment is not an option.

thanks for the help

majiktripp

Hard drives are always 7% smaller than advertised size, due to bytes conversion to gigbytes etc.
As for external hard drives, there as reliable as any hard drive can be, some fail at random, some will last you years...but I wouldn't worry about installing games etc on them as they should work fine. If you have important information, always keep it in more than 1 place (ie. on 2 pc's)

Saruman

You might be better moving your files etc to the second drive and leave installing games etc on the laptop. Only because you might not always have the ext drive and you might want to play games

mathias

As regards installing games on to an external hard drive , you may run into issues here , USB interfaces on laptops are usually a shared resource , so depending on whats being used you may get wildly different transfer speeds which will affect gameplay. In general , its not a good idea.

Also , with an install onto an external drive , you would need to make sure that the drive always has the same letter , sometimes , especially if you use a card reader etc. , the drive will not have the same letter if its unplugged and then plugged in again. This would cause problems as the game install would expect to see the data in the same place.
So you would have to assign a permanent letter to the drive.

Hard drives are always 7% smaller than advertised size, due to bytes conversion to gigbytes etc.

Its not always 7 percent , as a matter of fact with todays HD capacities its more like 10% , The correct definition of GB is decimal , ( 1GB = 1 x 10^9 ) whereas windows definition ( the incorrect one ) is binary , and there is no straight conversion factor from decimal to binary in terms of SI units.

Because of the difference between the two counting systems , the discrepancy gets larger in percent , the bigger the hard drive becomes.

Rest assured though , that its only a difference in the counting systems , nothing is missing or lost. They are not smaller than advertised ,they are actually advertised correctly in terms of SI units , its windows thats mis using the term GB as a binary term , which it is not and will never be!

See here ... bottom of the page , and the link to the binary issue !

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

Sephiroth_dude

Saruman wrote:

You might be better moving your files etc to the second drive and leave installing games etc on the laptop. Only because you might not always have the ext drive and you might want to play games

hmm good idea.

Saruman

mathias wrote:

Its not always 7 percent , as a matter of fact with todays HD capacities its more like 10% , The correct definition of GB is decimal , ( 1GB = 1 x 10^9 ) whereas windows definition ( the incorrect one ) is binary , and there is no straight conversion factor from decimal to binary in terms of SI units.

Because of the difference between the two counting systems , the discrepancy gets larger in percent , the bigger the hard drive becomes.

Rest assured though , that its only a difference in the counting systems , nothing is missing or lost.
See here ... bottom of the page , and the link to the binary issue !

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

Damn physics... Always thinks it has an explanation for everything

Actually though its better to believe we are being lied to by the hard drive manufacturers, which is probably more true. It gives us something to bitch about.
They might say its an 80gb drive but thats because its 81,956,000,000 bytes which is about 76gb or so.
They simply round off the bytes.
Its all a conspiracy

Sephiroth_dude

mathias wrote:

As regards installing games on to an external hard drive , you may run into issues here , USB interfaces on laptops are usually a shared resource , so depending on whats being used you may get wildly different transfer speeds which will affect gameplay. In general , its not a good idea.

Also , with an install onto an external drive , you would need to make sure that the drive always has the same letter , sometimes , especially if you use a card reader etc. , the drive will not have the same letter if its unplugged and then plugged in again. This would cause problems as the game install would expect to see the data in the same place.
So you would have to assign a permanent letter to the drive.

does'nt sound good cheers for the advice

AlmightyCushion

Sephiroth_dude wrote:

does'nt sound good cheers for the advice

He's basically saying that you could have problems installing games to the hard drive. If you move your files (video, music etc) to the external and install the games on the laptop hard drive you will have no problem.

mathias

Actually though its better to believe we are being lied to by the hard drive manufacturers, which is probably more true.

Probably a joke I know , but just to be clear ,

The hard drive manufacturers are 100% correct and are doing nothing wrong , 1GB = 1000,000,000 and thats all there is to it.

Windows is the culprit ,

Windows says 1GB is 1 073 741 824 which is definitely wrong , so its windows thats at fault , ( they should be using the prefix Gib not GB , then they would be correct )

Either way , if you take into account the fact that they are using different values for a GB , then you realise that there is nothing missing and they are both talking about the same amount of space.

RoyalMarine

Sephiroth_dude you dont need to fork out a fortune for the biggest and best external harddrive.
speed will vary no matter what when using usb. but your best to install games on your laptop harddrive, and use the eternal for everything else.

just get something you think will be big enough and that you can afford.

thegoth

Please Note. External hard drives are as reliable as internal ones, but in reality their are not nearly as reliable because of their nature, i.e many ext drivers are regularly moved around the place, from table to table. Into the car, into a laptop bag. Sometimes upside down. This greatly increases the risk of a head crash. I have my ext alot as I work in Dublin during the week and head home at weekends.

Best example of an ext hard drive crashing on me just because it was external was me coming home drunk one night. Wanting to listen to some tunes. Plugged in the hard drive. Next thing a heard wierd noises coming from the hard drive. I had turned it on upside down. Head crash. Data gone.

I lost 4 hard drives in one year. Loads of mps, vids,.... all lost. I now have two 500gb ext drives. I regularly back everything from the first one to the second one.

This sort of thing is the biggest disadvantage of ext hard drives in my opinion

Ghost Train

Didnt think there was an issue running hard drive upside down

I've had an external harddisk sitting on the floor, and a box of cdrs dropped off the table and hit the drive. Broke the drive

Sephiroth_dude

cheers for all the replys dudes and or dudettes dunno what im gonna do being honest,probbly get it and take yer advice and use my laptop for games and use the ext for music and stuff.

thegoth

Trust me. Its not a good idea putting any hard drive in upside down. I have crashed internal drives doing this while copying data. Wont crash the drive all the time but GREATLY increases changes of a head crash and drive failure

mathias

Its not a good idea putting any hard drive in upside down.

Back in the day I worked in Applied Magnetics in Clonshaugh , we made hard drive headstacks ,

Heres the thing , it shouldnt matter what way up a hard drive is , it should still work fine. The design is symmetrical inside , the headstack and disk platters look the same no matter what way up they are.

Also , the hard drive cages on most computer cases are not specifically designed for up down orientation , some go up , some go down , there is no rule here , precisely because it shouldnt matter ,

The drives that failed on you probably failed cos they got a knock , it wouldnt have anything to do with what way up they were. If it did , it would be marked on the drive.

Tom Dunne

Sephiroth_dude wrote:

I play alot of games so thats what I would want it for.Are they good for saving games or installing games on them?

As I have a 6Gig hard-drive on my laptop, I have to rely on an external hard-drive for all my storage. (long story, don't ask , damn you HP, etc.)

It's a P4 machine, about 3 years old now. While it isn't the fastest of machines, I have completed Half-Life 2 on it, running entirely from the external hard-drive. There is some delay in loading, but in general, games run fine.

I should also point out that I have an external DVD writer, 5.1 sound card, two gamepads and TV tuner card hooked up to the same laptop via USB and I don't experience any problems.

BostonB

On my old laptop I used to run games from an external 3.5" USB drive with not problems. If anything it was probably faster than using the internal drive.

Sephiroth_dude

tom dunne wrote:

As I have a 6Gig hard-drive on my laptop, I have to rely on an external hard-drive for all my storage. (long story, don't ask , damn you HP, etc.)

It's a P4 machine, about 3 years old now. While it isn't the fastest of machines, I have completed Half-Life 2 on it, running entirely from the external hard-drive. There is some delay in loading, but in general, games run fine.

I should also point out that I have an external DVD writer, 5.1 sound card, two gamepads and TV tuner card hooked up to the same laptop via USB and I don't experience any problems.

BostonB wrote:

On my old laptop I used to run games from an external 3.5" USB drive with not problems. If anything it was probably faster than using the internal drive.

Good to Know dudes