Hard drives are getting ever less expensive, and a couple of hundred bucks should buy a couple of hundred GigaBytes of storage. (My first hard drive was 5 MegaBytes and cost $800. And was a bargain at the time, because the only one available previously for my Apple ][ cost about $3000.)
But the current drives are big enough, certainly, to back up several computers without difficulty.
(Just in case, of course. Common wisdom is that there are only two kinds of hard drives: drives that have crashed. And drives that haven’t crashed. Yet!
I’m looking for a portable unit that would connect through a FireWire (IEEE 1394, technically speaking) or USB2 connection.
But lately I’ve been seeing advertisments for even less expensive drives, suitable, presumably, for installation in directly in a computer, and also, for what seemed labelled as hard drive enclosures. Some examples can be found here. Apparently, I could buy a naked drive, all set up for installation within a computer, install it in one of these enclosures, instead, and have my outboard storage for a reasonable saving over an all-in-one-piece unit.
If any reader has worked on a project like this, I’d be interested in your experiences.
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