External storage

[Melchiades]

I'm buying a laptop. Problem is I have about 900Gigs of MP3/Movies/TV-series/Pron spread over 2 SATA disks and an IDE disk. What is the best way to do this?

[BiPolar_Nut]

depends how much you want to spend

Another option is network storage, either on independent devices or another computer.

[Melchiades]

Whoah. That was a lot more than I expected.

[BiPolar_Nut]

I've also seen 3, 4, or 5 drive enclosures for around $350...then you need to add drives.

You're talking almost a terrabyte of data...it won't be cheap.

You could also consider several cheap single drives and just not have it all available at the same time.

[Grunch]

If you don't need RAID (I really doubt you do), then just do this:

Get a bunch of drives (150 each):

(link)

...and an enclosure for each one (30 each)...
(link)

...then string them all together using a simple USB hub (30)...
(link)

And you have 1 TB of data accessible on your laptop for $400, and you can easily add more storage as you need it.

If you plug that USB hub in to some machine on your home network and make it visible across the network (I'm not a network guy, so I don't really know how to do this), you don’t even need it to be physically attached to the laptop.

[Grunch]

BTW - You don't even need to buy the drives if you want to just take your existing drives and put them in enclosures. Save most of the 400 that way.

[Jeff_B]

dude delete some porn and a TB of stuff is ALOT if youre realyl downloading that much you prob should buy a huge amount of external storage like the first link or start using dvds to back up stuff thats realyl not that necessary

[Melchiades]

Cheers.