Help with external hard drive options

[Drano]

So in recent months I've been fiddling with making videos. In the process I've found the raw material for that tends to take up crazy ammounts of hard drive space. That eureka moment happened when I sat down to do a little cleanup on the drive I was keeping those files on thinking I'd just burn em to a DVD and clear off some space. Well that ain't happenin!

So I'm looking at adding some hard drive space. All of my internal bays are full of drives that I use for other things and that works for me. All of my drives, other than the OS drive that's a Crucial SSD, are WD Black drives. Love the Black drives. I've never had a problem with one(knock on wood). I can do a couple of things. I have a CM-690 case that has a HD dock built into the top. I've used that to check drives and format them before actually installing them in the case. I could just buy a drive and stick it in there and I'm sure that'd work. It'd look like hell and wouldn't be very well protected, but it'd work. I could also buy an external drive and go that way. Or I could buy a drive and an enclosure and do that. My board has USB 3.

Cutting to the chase I'm wondering what any of you guys that have a similar problem are doing? I see a lot of mixed reviews on straight up external drives. That'd be the easiest way to go but I'd want something reliable, especially if I'm gonna be putting a ton of stuff on it. My rig, since my girls have their own laptops, isn't a 24/7 thing. I only run it on the nights I'm flying pretty much. If I went with another Black drive in an enclosure--what's a good enclosure? Just exploring that route.

Thanks in advance.

[Bizman]

Clearing off some space using an external media is a good idea indeed, especially if you have tons of huge files that you don't actually use but which you'd like to have safe in case you'd want to work on them in the future. As you noticed, DVD's are quite small...

I wouldn't recommend using an external hard disk as a more or less permanently attached work drive. That said, the black series would be overkill. It just consumes more energy and costs more per gb which are unnecessary features for a means of archiving. Instead I'd recommend getting two cheaper ones, even the green series will do, saving your projects and final productions duplicated. The idea is to always have the data in two places in case something bad happens. Normally they would be the computer and an external media, but since you want to get free space on your installed disks, two externals is the safe way to go.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

You can get an USB3 enclosure and slap in any sata harddrive you want. There's no need to buy a packaged solution. Another option for you is to use eSata if your board supports it. With eSata you can extend your 'internal' hdds with external ones. For 40-50 bucks you should be able to buy a box with eSata / USB3 capability and then you just slap a 2-3Tb drive on it for use. Best part is that you can replace the drive in a couple of seconds with another one if it gets full. Just like in the old days with floppy disks

One thing you could do is start replacing your internal drives with high capacity ones and leave the old drives for backups after you copy the data from them to the larger drive. I personally have a collection of drives which I sometimes reuse for projects or in the worst scenario use for restoring old data.

[Drane]

Bought 4 external USB hard drive cases and they're stacked up on top of the pc. Got HDs separately on sale (cheapest with the best warranty/reviews).

This is for the media/gaming pc connected to the big screen in the living area.

All kinds of media stored on these plus the system backups.

If you have a hard drive you want to keep from going to standby all the time, use KeepAliveHD. I use this for the non-system internal drives.

[gyrene81]

newegg has some external drives on sale...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136749&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL100813&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL100813-_-EMC-100813-Index-_-ExternalHardDrives-_-22136749-L0H

add promo code EMCWXXM48 and get it for $100, good til thursday.

[Drano]

Right I saw this earlier but when I read a  lot of bad reviews  about it failing in a fairly short period of time I figured I'd steer clear of that one.

The wheels were clanking in my head this afternoon. Now I'm thinking I buy a decent WD internal drive in the 2TB or so range, put it on my dock and transfer all the video files from the 500GB drive currently on the machine, remove that one, then put the new larger drive in it's place.

Now I'll havea good 500GB drive  that I can put in an enclosure. Anyone using one? Which ones suck? Better?