external hard drives
 

ohh i love TFP! thanks again in advance for helpnig me out with another question :thumbsup:




well i'm a laptop guy, i have two laptops with 40 gig hard drives that are full and i'm trying to produce a movie, which doesn't quite work without ALOT of spare space!!



i went to tigerdirect.com and found the " Seagate 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Buffer Hard Drive "

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...?EdpNo=1696315


now for my question, it said this at the bottom of the page....


i know i have Windows XP pro and XP home, both copies are fully updated... pentium 4... etc.... now it says it needs support of 48bit logical block addressing..? whats that? and how do i know if it will work with me? :crazy:



...and if you have any other good harddrives that you might point out to me... price isnt the issue, but i would like it to be reasonable...



also, i've heard that firewire was the way to go with these... or has USB 2.0 just wiped that off the map??? my laptops have the smaller 4 point firewfires and USB 2.0

FireWire vs. USB performance is mainly up to the system and drive. FireWire is often a little faster due to efficiencies but you would not likely notice it. If it means buying more cables go ahead and stick with USB. If it isn't much more, get a version that allows either. It can be handy.

If you use XP SP2 you almost certainly have 48bit LBA enabled (unless the hardware or BIOS is funky). You can read more about making certain here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;303013

I bought a similar drive. I'm still waiting on the rebate...

i'm not tooo expecting on rebates, my last one took 5 months from radio shack :crazy:


by the time they come in, it's just like a gift!

LaCie makes nice drives, that allow both Firewire and USB connections. They come with a nice collection of cables as well.

great deal! I like the enclosure it comes with too...looks like you can interchange hd's which is exactly the kind of flexibility you want.

as long as you have sp1 or 2 installed, like cyrnel said, unless something was purposely set in BIOS you shouldn't have a problem seeing the full size of the drive.

Should mention that not having 48bit LBA enabled on a large drive has evil potential beyond not seeing all the available space. Some 28bit routines do not handle the roll-over and will corrupt the filesystem. For that reason the drives I haul around have a 137GB partition with the extra on manually mounted filesystems. Never know when I'll have to plug into some old beast or dual boot to 98/2k.