Nick Volpe
thinking about getting one for christmas and i need to know a price. and does the brand matter?
Answer
You're looking anywhere from $70 to about $160 for an external hard drive. However, I would recommend getting an internal hard drive and a matching case, since most external hard drives are nothing more than just that. Plus, internal hard drives are a lot cheaper, you can get virtually any 1 TB hard drive for under $100. I cannot give you a link to the hard drives cases, since I haven't researched them at all.
As for the brand, I'd recommend Western Digital.
You're looking anywhere from $70 to about $160 for an external hard drive. However, I would recommend getting an internal hard drive and a matching case, since most external hard drives are nothing more than just that. Plus, internal hard drives are a lot cheaper, you can get virtually any 1 TB hard drive for under $100. I cannot give you a link to the hard drives cases, since I haven't researched them at all.
As for the brand, I'd recommend Western Digital.
external hard drive question?
Andrew R
when you buy an external hard drive... say 500 GB.... why is it that when you take it out of the box box the free space says something like 400 GB free.... and how can you reclaim the entire space...is this possible?
im not talking about the software crap that comes loaded.
i think its all false advertising......
Answer
If you plug the drive in, and you see that 400 GB are free -AND- that more space is available but occupied by files that you are certain you don't want or need... just format the disk.
However - if you read the fine print, they tell you the different ways that size is calculated.
Computer geeks like me, and most operating systems are designed to count in powers of 2.
So, a nice round number near 1000 happens to be 2 ^ 10 = 1024.
to the average consumer, and by the 'normal' metric definitions, this is close enough to 1000 that we might call 1024 bytes " 1 kilobyte".
If this was all we were talking about, then not so bad.. only a 2.4% error in what I call a kilobyte (1024), and what the label calls a kilobyte (1000).
blow that up to huge hundreds of Giga-byte sizes..
( 10^3 = kilo, 10^6 = mega 10^9 = giga)
and that little 2.4% error has now become pretty significant.
If a disk drive is made with 500,000,000 bytes of space..
(and lets assume that it is perfect.. and the usual 1-2% of sectors are-NOT- marked as damaged on this ideal disk)
now the marketing for a 500 GB disk (where a GB is 10^9 bytes) is equal to about 466 of my GB (where a GB is 1024 or 2^10 MB.. 2^30 Bytes) now we are looking at a compounded error - something like 7.4% at this point. It gets worse when we start counting Terabytes.
That is sometimes misleading, but unlikely to change soon.
Like I mentioned a little bit before.. this 466 GB of computer gigabytes now gets whittled down. A few sectors of the drive are marked bad, and may never get read or used. There should be some spare space built in, but maybe this particular drive really had a lot of bad spots. Also, Windows can only multiply sectors in certain numbers.. another binary thing. So the drive might have something like 7000 KB hanging over.. if the smallest sector is 8192 KB, then the 'extra' 7000 doesn't make a full sector. Windows just leaves that as unused space.
If your computer comes from the factory, many manufacturers place special diagnostic partitions, or even full software reload partitions on the hard disk. You might not be able to access these without special software. So then your drive loses another 2 - 20 GB of space with these specialty partitions.
Just think of this before you jump at formatting your drive. You might destroy some data or files that will be needed later.
Lots of folks are upset when they learn that 1GB doesn't always equal 1GB.
If you buy any other 'thing'.. you deal with the metric definition of a nice, even power of 10 conversion. We could make the operating system 'dumb' and just tell us that 1GB = 10^9 instead of 2 ^30.. but that isn't the way most binary counting is done.
If you plug the drive in, and you see that 400 GB are free -AND- that more space is available but occupied by files that you are certain you don't want or need... just format the disk.
However - if you read the fine print, they tell you the different ways that size is calculated.
Computer geeks like me, and most operating systems are designed to count in powers of 2.
So, a nice round number near 1000 happens to be 2 ^ 10 = 1024.
to the average consumer, and by the 'normal' metric definitions, this is close enough to 1000 that we might call 1024 bytes " 1 kilobyte".
If this was all we were talking about, then not so bad.. only a 2.4% error in what I call a kilobyte (1024), and what the label calls a kilobyte (1000).
blow that up to huge hundreds of Giga-byte sizes..
( 10^3 = kilo, 10^6 = mega 10^9 = giga)
and that little 2.4% error has now become pretty significant.
If a disk drive is made with 500,000,000 bytes of space..
(and lets assume that it is perfect.. and the usual 1-2% of sectors are-NOT- marked as damaged on this ideal disk)
now the marketing for a 500 GB disk (where a GB is 10^9 bytes) is equal to about 466 of my GB (where a GB is 1024 or 2^10 MB.. 2^30 Bytes) now we are looking at a compounded error - something like 7.4% at this point. It gets worse when we start counting Terabytes.
That is sometimes misleading, but unlikely to change soon.
Like I mentioned a little bit before.. this 466 GB of computer gigabytes now gets whittled down. A few sectors of the drive are marked bad, and may never get read or used. There should be some spare space built in, but maybe this particular drive really had a lot of bad spots. Also, Windows can only multiply sectors in certain numbers.. another binary thing. So the drive might have something like 7000 KB hanging over.. if the smallest sector is 8192 KB, then the 'extra' 7000 doesn't make a full sector. Windows just leaves that as unused space.
If your computer comes from the factory, many manufacturers place special diagnostic partitions, or even full software reload partitions on the hard disk. You might not be able to access these without special software. So then your drive loses another 2 - 20 GB of space with these specialty partitions.
Just think of this before you jump at formatting your drive. You might destroy some data or files that will be needed later.
Lots of folks are upset when they learn that 1GB doesn't always equal 1GB.
If you buy any other 'thing'.. you deal with the metric definition of a nice, even power of 10 conversion. We could make the operating system 'dumb' and just tell us that 1GB = 10^9 instead of 2 ^30.. but that isn't the way most binary counting is done.
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