External USB harddrive deal at Wal-Mart

[Tron]

I, too, use the Thermaltake docks (after hearing about them from Anole ). They work wonderfully. There are so many devices that can benefit from one of these now... The Visionsat IV-200, the Western Digital WDTV Live (or plain WDTV) media player, and even many of the new LCD TVs have built-in media players and connections for USB hard drives.

If you are interested in the two-bay dock, be aware that your SATA controller must be able to support port multipliers (most of them can)...

 

[primestar31]

Yes, 1000 gigabytes, if you need that. - :up
This is an internal SATA drive.
Here is a discussion to help you decide if it's useful.

See next post for somewhere to stick it. -

I got one of these a couple weeks ago, and am using it in the E-sata/USB dock.

I have a REAL PROBLEM in not seeing: "DEATH-star" every time I read the name!

Hopefully, it's better than the ones that warranted that title.

 

[Larry1]

I like the docks if you are not handling the drive very much. But if you want to move them around prefer an external case. The case provides protection to the drive. Static can kill a drive, and the winter weather with dry air promotes static. You don't need a visible shock to kill a drive. With drives getting bigger and bigger, you loose a lot if the drive dies.

 

[Tron]

The exposed nature of the docks concerned me at first, but I haven't had any issues yet. I'm careful about where I grasp the drives when I remove them from the docks, and most importantly, to let them sit for 1 minute before moving them after shutdown.

 

[Anole]

using those USB drives:

I went to lunch yesterday, with Joe, the friend who sold me on the Thermaltake drive dock idea.
Afterwards, we went to a local Fry's, and he talked himself into taking home a 42" LG LCD TV that he'd been lusting over for some time.

It has both ethernet interface, and USB.
The latter port plays DivX and XviD from his thumb drive.
We joked about the size & cost of 8 or 16gb solid state drive.
I reminded him of some 60gb pocket transportable (external) WD drives we had been playing with.
Their price/performance ratio beat the heck out of solid state, and we have several units already.

For the next phase, his intention is to plug in a Thermaltake drive dock, and use some cheap 1000gb drives he picked up a while back.
They are green drives, with small cache, and 5400 rpm, which he got for around $50.

So, I guess each technology has its place:
- 8 / 16 gb thumb drive for a quick test
- 60 gb 2½ inch external hard drive to swap files with friends
- 1000 gb green drives in the dock, for that serious collection.

 

[primestar31]

I went to lunch yesterday, with Joe, the friend who sold me on the Thermaltake drive dock idea.
Afterwards, we went to a local Fry's, and he talked himself into taking home a 42" LG LCD TV that he'd been lusting over for some time.

It has both ethernet interface, and USB.
The latter port plays DivX and XviD from his thumb drive.
We joked about the size & cost of 8 or 16gb solid state drive.
I reminded him of some 60gb pocket transportable (external) WD drives we had been playing with.
Their price/performance ratio beat the heck out of solid state, and we have several units already.

For the next phase, his intention is to plug in a Thermaltake drive dock, and use some cheap 1000gb drives he picked up a while back.
They are green drives, with small cache, and 5400 rpm, which he got for around $50.

So, I guess each technology has its place:
- 8 / 16 gb thumb drive for a quick test
- 60 gb 2½ inch external hard drive to swap files with friends
- 1000 gb green drives in the dock, for that serious collection.

....And a multi-harddrive RAID setup, so that WHEN your TB drives go bad, you hopefully won't lose a ton of data/tv shows/movies, that you spent a lot of time ripping, and encoding!