Is this a good buy.

Someone that does data recovery from hard drives posted in a newsgroup that I sometimes read that Seagate are the best brand for reliability. The Ebuyer reviews say it has a Seagate drive inside so I'd say it was a good bet as well as a good deal.
 
It's a good price for that size drive..... As Rob said, Seagate drives are reliable and aside from the 500GB My Book that someone mentioned on here from Amazon (which was 99.99) the only other ones I've seen are around £120. Just noticed that this is free del as well, and the feedback is good, so you're getting an extra half terabyte of storage for under £100......

If I wasn't going on hols next month I'd probably order one myself for those just in case moments, but the Mrs would have my body parts off

Nearest I could get to this price on a quick recce of my usual haunts was a 500gb SATA Hitachi Deskstar Drive, with External SATA Enclosure separately ordered, for £111 (Inc Vat and Delivery).

My only worry would be that with 500GB of data on it and plenty of activity, it might be a bit prone to overheating if left on all the time. If you're thinking of leaving it on it might be worth having a quick look at the Networked Storage options (similar to this but with network connection as well as usb) as these tend to have cooling fans, and 'hibernate' functions, but then the price goes up as well.


EDIT - Sorry, forgot about the formatting bit... FAT32 is generally deemed to be OLD now. and NTFS is more comatible with modern O/S.
Dug this out from somewhere about FAT32.

'FAT32 has limitations. Unfortunately, it isn't compatible with any operating system other than Windows 98 and the OSR2 version of Windows 95. However, Windows 2000 & XP will be able to read FAT32 partitions. The other disadvantage is that your disk utilities and antivirus software must be FAT32-aware. Otherwise, they could interpret the new file structure as an error and try to correct it, thus destroying data in the process'. Also I vaguely remember from somewhere that your maximum filesize on a FAT32 Partition can't exceed 4GB (for one file) whereas I don't think there is a maximum for an NTFS partition.

Downside of NTFS is that it's file structure and protocol takes up more space on your drive..... so a 500GB drive when formatted in NTFS will actually have less than 500GB of free space (sorry don't know off the top of my head how much you'll be left with but would guess at around 460GB)..

More information can be found here: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm
There's loads of pros and cons, but personally I'd stick with NTFS.

Easy to do from Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management
 
Here is the link to the hard drive from Amazon....they have knocked off a couple of pounds since I bought a couple of days ago.

I bought it for the price and on the back of the reviews of purchasers at the bottom of the link....

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Dig...000EXZB0M/ref=pd_sbs_ce_1/026-3292961-8202063

From reading on your link, I would have been just as tempted to buy it. I haven't got mine out of the box yet, just collected from depot at lunchtime to know if it has a decent fan to overcome any overheating worries. Will keep you posted.
 
Just set the External Hard Drive up with a little partitioning and converted to NTFS from FAT32. It's a breeze if I can do it.

Now plenty of space again on a hard drive..........where's that camera? :clap:
 
I bought the 400Gb one from Maplins about a month or two ago for £83! Great drive. Used only for backing up my other drives. I've now got 1.5Tb of space :D
 
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