External Hard Drive

I'm a teenager on a budget. The computer I work on gave me a warning saying that the windows virtual memory something or other is approaching capacity. I need an external hard drive fairly inexpensive but I need to be able to store a bunch of RAW images and stuff like that. What hard drives do you have and what hard drives would you recommend? I thank you for your input.

 

Cool, we're getting a costco here soon I know the guy that's doing the signs for them and they've done it already so by the time it opens I'll probably have the money to get it cuase like I said I'm a poor teenager.

 

Thanks, It's funny that you compared the form factor to a mac mini cause I'm looking at those among other macs because I need my own computer that's a mac.

 

I would recommend signing up for the daily emails from buy.com and newegg.com, two of the biggest electronics retailers on the internet. Both routinely have 300 - 500 GB USB2.0 external drives on sale for around the $99 marks, and there are reviews of the products right on line.

There is a huge variation between manufacturers in access and read times on these drives, so be sure you invest in a good one. I've got a 500GB MyBook (as well as a 1TB HP Mediaserver) which I use for online image backup, and I'm thinking about adding another 1TB external drive to backup my images and video files. That third drive would be kept offsite (at my dad's house or my safety deposit box) ... just in case of a fire or some other disaster.

 

If you are looking for a cheap external, Best Buy, Staples, Office Max all run sales weekly. I actually did something a little different with my external. I have a pair of Seagate 1TB SATA drives. I put one in my computer to store all of my photos, and put the other in an external enclosure to act as the backup drive. The nice thing is that if the internal fails, I can take the other drive out of the external and put it in the computer and I'm back up and running.

 

The sata drives are great for mass storage, but unless you get the expensive ones (and why bother?) the seek times are usually very very slow compared to other alternatives. If you know that going in, you won't be disappointed!

 

Thanks guys for your help and opinions.

 

Are we even sure that the issue is limited internal hard drive space?


That message about virtual memory sounds to me like Windows (if we are indeed talking about windows) saying that you're running so much stuff at once that it wants more virtual memory space to page the excess data onto. I used to get that occasionally, now I just tell Windows from the outset that I want it to use a larger VM page file size. It keeps the page file on one contiguous section of the hard drive and prevents fragmentation.

 

That could be it Dan. It probably is. I still need one cause this computer is screwed up and eventually I need to get a new computer. By the way, pages are not loading properly.My twiter is completely messed up the page doesn't load right. Does anyone know why?

 

I've been having my own memory problem... my new motherboard seems to eat RAM. It appears to have destroyed two sets of high end DDR2 RAM now, I'm running on only one gigabyte (it only kills one at a time, the remaining stick seems to have a few weeks of life left until it dies, this time I'm easing back on my timings and lowering the voltage it's getting to try to extend it's life as long as I can) and hating having to wait for all the extra virtual memory paging. It REALLY slows down Photoshop work.

I have no idea as to the possible causes of web pages loading up weird, outside of network problems or issues of compatibility with specific web browsers I have no bright ideas there. A quick web search found one or two people complaining of the Twitter front page taking too long to load, or not loading completely.

I don't use it, I have no personal experience on the matter.

 

I know it's not a browser compatibility issue because I can use other computers with the same browser and it works well. Twitter is a problem for me. On the computer with problems it loads with text way far over to the right. I'll put up some screenshots later.

 

How exactly does one verify whether a memory stick has gone "bad" or not ? I think one or more of the sticks on my 3GB system is fried - my machine is running far slower than usual and I've ruled out hard drive or virus as cause.

As for the original thread topic ... here's a good price on a 500 GB external drive - $109 from buy.com: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?s ... caid=17070

 

At the risk of derailing the topic I'll go in depth into my tale of woe regarding the RAM.

Basically, I started getting errors. One of the less drastic signs is that Firefox will suddenly shut down on me. Once that happens, if I don't reboot then after a while longer I'll generally get a BSOD (blue screen of death) error. The blue screen errors vary widely, it seems that the errors don't always mean anything. I've gotten errors in USB drivers, in the NTFS system, all over. It appears that when the RAM causes problems they're not consistent, although there are a few blue screen errors that are apparently most likely caused by bad RAM.

I verified that it was due to the RAM because I tried using my two sticks one at a time until I found the one that worked reliably. But then eventually the good one died as well and I had to replace the set. This happened twice now. If my system is running true to history then in another week or two this remaining good stick will start giving me errors too. The thing that has me burned up is that I've now seen reports of other people having the same problems, it appears that Crucial changed the type of RAM used in these sticks and the replacement model isn't near as good or reliable as the original even though it's being sold under the same name with no indication of the hardware change.

If the nature of the reduced speeds that you're seeing is of having to wait for hard drive crunching when you're trying to load up a new program or switching between them, then that could indicate that your system is having to page data to the page file more frequently, and that could be because you have less RAM. Have you checked to see that your system is still seeing all three gigabytes? If you're using windows you can find out by going into the control panel and then selecting system, the first screen (the general tab) should tell you how much memory your system is seeing.

I wouldn't expect slowness but no errors to be symptomatic of RAM problems. I mean maybe it could indicate that your RAM is running too slowly, but you'd have had to make that change yourself in the system's BIOS. It shouldn't just spontaneously slow down on its own, even if it's degrading the system shouldn't automatically slow it down in reaction, it should keep running it at the normal speed and you should be seeing errors. On the other hand, during my troubleshooting of the first set of RAM I did have a day where my system just didn't see one of the two sticks. Ironically that may have made it run more reliably, because the missing stick might have been the unreliable one.

As to taking out one stick at a time and testing the remaining ones... that may not help you. Cutting back on the amount of RAM in a system will tend to make it run slower anyway. I mean if you pull a stick and then find that the system is running faster that may be a good hint that you've found the problem, but it's not what I would expect to happen even if you did pull a bad one.

You can check this out:
http://www.memtest.org/

It's a memory tester that you can get in many formats, from a floppy disk image to a CD image to a version meant to be used on flash drives. You HAVE to boot to the medium you install it to, it can't be run from within windows. In my case it doesn't always show errors, it seems that I have to stress my memory out first and then it shows errors. I don't really know what this means. But it's free, you have nothing to lose by trying it other than the time it takes to run. It will keep running continuously if you let it, it doesn't stop at the end of the cycle, but it'll give you a message when it's completed a full cycle.

 

Jeez. Sounds like I just killed another weekend playing "hunt down the bad ram". That's certainly my problem - I went from incredibly stable to random BSODs almost overnight. Overall system speed is slower, and graphics intensive apps (especially video and photo work) tend to screw the pooch with the BSOD more than anything else.