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A MyBook would still be the cheapest out there, just about. All of them are simple (i.e. plug and pray). Reliability: have had two MyBooks, and only got rid because of annoying spin up/down thing mentioned above. I've had no such problem with my Maxtor external, which is the only one I've kept as an addition to the NAS. Most of your options are pretty much of a muchness, to be honest.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 16:59 (nineteen years ago)

Hm, I need a music drive....

― JW, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:14 (nineteen years ago)

As in? For storage on your pc? As an ipod kind of a thing? Personal recs=NAS (Buffalo terastation) for storing flac files (flac=lossless=good). Alternative to that would be the external drives mentioned above. iAudio X5 as a portable ipoddy thing, as long as you RockBox it quicksmart. You can then convert your flac to ogg, and away you go.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:21 (nineteen years ago)

why would you need to rockbox a X5?

― koogs, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:22 (nineteen years ago)

Something that can do NAS and usb. Firewire would be nice

― JW, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:24 (nineteen years ago)

I though that the firmware was awful. Like, why play ogg that isn't gapless? Plus the icon based gui didn't do it for me. Personal taste, though, I suppose.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:25 (nineteen years ago)

JW, this was what I got. Raid 5 ends up at 1.2 TB. I thought that would probably keep me in available space for a while. Not sure about usb/firewire with that, though.

― peteR, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:28 (nineteen years ago)

I though that the firmware was awful. Like, why play ogg that isn't gapless? Plus the icon based gui didn't do it for me. Personal taste, though, I suppose.

well, yeah - my m5 does natively 95% of the stuff people rockbox their ipods for anyway (ogg, flac, usb...) so i didn't see a lot of point. (the m5 doesn't have icons, just a list). mine's suffereing from limited battery - after 15 months i get about an hour out of a full charge so i'm looking to buy another, possibly a different make (keep the m5 as a 20G external drive full of mp3s)

the new D2 looks nice though.

― koogs, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 17:57 (nineteen years ago)

Ooh, I didn't see this thread before buying a Western Digital Essential MyBook (250GB) from Amazon for about £60. (Maplin are doing them for a tenner more but have ceased their cheap Seagate deals for the time being).

I'm wondering if I can use it as a backup device from both a Win XP laptop and a Win ME desktop? Would that involve partitioning? I bought it primarily cos we're rapidly running out of space on the laptop and I want to archive a lot of stuff off, but it would be handy to use it on both machines. Is there a file format issue between XP and ME (FAT32/NTFS)? And backup utilities - I think there's one bundled with XP but I'd need something for the ME machine. How do they work - first = full backup, subsequent = incrementals?

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 13:52 (nineteen years ago)

I have no spin-up/down problems on my MyBook. That sounds like an OS issue rather than a hard drive issue. My OS is Mac OS X 10.4.8. The MyBook is connected over Firewire.

― caek, Thursday, 8 March 2007 13:57 (nineteen years ago)

If Steady Mike has a MyBook, then I shall get a MyBook. Thanks for your help everyone - my ignorance as to what spin-up/down means need never be put straight.

― Mark C, Thursday, 8 March 2007 14:17 (nineteen years ago)

Jeez, don't go thinking I know what I'm doing! My thought process on this went: are Seagate drives at Maplin still cheap? No, but they're pushing WD drives now. Can I get a WD drive cheaper anywhere else? Yes. Are the reviews generally positive? Yes. Where's my credit card?

I guess I'd have to stick with FAT32 on the MyBook if I wanted to hook it up to the Win ME machine - is this right? It was delivered by someone who thought he was doing us a favour (as there was no one in) by shoving the package through the wire mesh above the locked gate that links the garden passage with the car port, which means it fell about eight feet onto concrete. It may not even work.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 14:24 (nineteen years ago)

spin down is where the disk stops spinning (because it's not being used and is trying to save energy, which is probably a good thing). the problem comes the next time you want to access it it has to spin up again before it can access the files and this feels lumpy. listen carefully and you can hear it stop and wind up again.

(also, my cd burner would produce coasters if the hdd on the same ide cable span down during burning. took me a while to figure that one out and a simple hdparm command to fix.)

fat32 is fine mike, my seagate is the same and i use it with win98, linux, xp, win2k...

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:00 (nineteen years ago)

as for mp3player battery, it ran out this morning halfway to work which is about 50 minutes in total with a 12 hour dormant period in the middle. charged it up when i got here and set it playing and it was ok for 3.5 hours, which is enough. but curious. lots of forum posts about using ds-lite batteries as replacements so i might try that. or buy one like mike's.

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:04 (nineteen years ago)

Everyone who buys a WD MyBook seems to reformat the bugger to NTFS immediately, but I guess they haven't got flaky 6-y-o PCs with terrible operating systems languishing upstairs. I'll stay fat.

My Samsung thing only recharges in a USB socket, y'know, Koogs.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:15 (nineteen years ago)

Oh no! I'll have to reformat the thing? I have two XP PCs, one with home and one with pro I think. I don't want it to be complicated :(

― Mark C, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:19 (nineteen years ago)

Well, no, you don't have to. I haven't even taken it out of its static-proof wrapper (with the lovely silica gel sachet - num), so I don't really know, but I think it's FAT32 out of the box. XP & NT support NTFS and FAT32 but the former is probably what yr internal HDD is and NTFS is better cos the N stands for New and New is always better, roight?

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:23 (nineteen years ago)

mark, you don't need to reformat, it'll do as it is. you might lose some functionality like per-user permissions and stuff that ntfs adds but i doubt that'll bother you. - http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=63 for details (which doesn't mention the 4G file size limit)

usb socket = ok, mike, i have usb sockets.

― koogs, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:34 (nineteen years ago)

I guess I should partition this thing too, eh? One chunk for desktop backup, one for laptop backup. Which means I could then convert/reformat one of the partitions to NTFS (I can imagine the 4GB file limit being a problem one day). I presume I can create unequal partitions? 200/50 split would be good.

― Michael Jones, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:42 (nineteen years ago)

I got the 500GB MyBook "Premium" (i.e. USB2 + FW400) on Amazon a month or so back for £110. If you're doing video editing it's worth springing for the "Professional", i.e. USB 2 + FW800. Conversely, if you're on Windows and not doing video editing you don't even need the Premium version.

Found mine on Amazon.co.uk, as recommended by my new favorite price comparison site, DoorOne: http://doorone.co.uk/xPF-Western-Digital-Western-Digital-500GB-My-Book-Premium-1C-External-Hard-Drive-USB2-0-Firewire-Retail-kit.

― caek, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:55 (nineteen years ago)

I have two 500G MyBooks if anyone wants to buy them off me.

― peteR, Thursday, 8 March 2007 16:39 (nineteen years ago)

my solution to a 3 hr journey home and an mp3 player with a battery life of about an hour = dig the minidisc out of the attic 8)

(actually, i used it friday to record gig and the week before for mp3ing vinyl, has been in pretty constant use for 10 years and still gets 6 hours or so on a single charge)

― koogs, Friday, 9 March 2007 11:15 (nineteen years ago)

koogs, I have remembered over the weekend why I was so adamant about rockboxing the X5. I knew there was a proper reason, and it is that there is a file limit of 9999, which on a 60G player (like mine) is not a right lot. OK, so if you like prog rock it's never going to be a problem, as three songs will fill up the entirely of the player, but for anyone else...

― peteR, Monday, 12 March 2007 08:24 (nineteen years ago)

Has anyone managed to get flickrfs working with MacFUSE

― Ed, Monday, 12 March 2007 20:56 (nineteen years ago)

Ok, here's a question about formatting/partitioning this WD 250GB MyBook what I have bought (and which I've now established does actually work, despite the best efforts of Amazon's delivery courier to break it)...

It comes with a single 232GB FAT32 partition, but converting it to NTFS is a doddle. However, I want to use it as:
(a) a backup device for WinXP laptop (80GB HDD)
(b) a backup device for WinME desktop (40GB HDD)
(c) a place to store video, images and audio that overspill from the laptop

Now, it isn't possible to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB from a WinXP machine. You can create a FAT32 partition larger than this from a WinME machine. So, what should I do? Partition it in FAT32 from the desktop (say, 40/80/112 roughly) and then convert (or reformat) the 80/112 partitions as NTFS on the laptop. Is this feasible?

Presumably that will leave me with a HDD that has three partitions, only one of which is visible from the WinME machine.

I'm still pondering my backup strategy - normal/differential, I guess. But I'd prefer my video/audio/images to be freely available in their own partition rather than tied up in a .bck file. Does that make sense?

― Michael Jones, Monday, 12 March 2007 23:24 (nineteen years ago)

That's too many words for me to concentrate on, Mike, but do you need a FAT32 partition at all? If your new machine can see your ME machine (which it ought to be able to), then you could get data from it, rather than trying to put data from the ME machine to the NTFS partition.

― Keith, Monday, 12 March 2007 23:31 (nineteen years ago)

Well, my thinking was: I need to partition this MyBook to (at least) keep the laptop and desktop data physically separate (or maybe I don't)? I can't create big enough FAT32 partitions from the XP laptop to store all my data from either machine. I can create NTFS partitions that are as big as the moon but that's no good for the ME desktop (it won't see them). So the only solution seems to be creating greater-than-32GB FAT32 partitions from the ME desktop and then converting one or more of them to NTFS from the XP laptop.

This supposes:
(a) the need to have separate partitions for the two computers
(b) the desirability of using NTFS for backing up XP laptop data

Maybe I don't need to do anything - I just have three big folders on the pre-formatted FAT32 232GB disc: Laptop backups, Desktop backups, Other data. Easy, I guess - but the most efficient use of the HDD?

― Michael Jones, Monday, 12 March 2007 23:45 (nineteen years ago)

(I'm going to unplug the MyBook HDD and pop in back in its shiny pouch overnight. Ner-night, everybody).

― Michael Jones, Monday, 12 March 2007 23:51 (nineteen years ago)

every time i partition a disk (multiple linux distros) i end up with one partition that's 99% full and another that's barely used. which is a pain. so these days i don't tend to bother with partitioning beyond one for / and one for /home (C:\ and D:\ for windows people). large partitions are painful when fscking but that's what journalled file systems are for.

i wouldn't use ntfs - frankly i don't trust bill gates with my data.

haven't bothered with a generational approach to my backups (it's mostly mp3s that i can always re-rip and anything that needs versioning is kept in cvs / svn anyway), i just run rsync when i remember.

― koogs, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 10:18 (nineteen years ago)

The thing that bothers me about having one huge FAT32 partition is that FAT drives are kinda notorious for getting fragmented very easily and becoming a pain in the backside to use. But, then again, I'm not really going to be using the MyBook like that - it'll be a place for laptop/desktop backups (maybe a full one once a month for the former with weekly differentials, a full one for the latter full stop (it's barely used thesedays)) and a huge cache of audio/video/images which I'll just be adding to. The backups will be wiped and replaced every once in a while, so no great danger of fragmentation.

― Michael Jones, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 10:27 (nineteen years ago)

If you are feeling L33t have a go with MacFUSE posted above which gives you a way of doing read/write on NTFS from OS X.

― Ed, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 10:45 (nineteen years ago)

Awesome = Services menu!!

apple+shift+Y = new sticky of selected txt

― Catsupppppppppppppp dude ‫茄蕃‪, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 21:55 (nineteen years ago)

Youtube problem.

This whole week, I haven't been able to get past the black "Loading video" screen, which had been a problem ever since I upgraded to Peerguardian 2 several months ago. But I've since perm-allowed most of the IPs for YT, and when I go to YT now, I'm not seeing any IPs getting blocked.

I've tried disabling PG2, then turning off my firewall (ZA), I've checked to make sure that Quicktime isn't my default program to handle streaming videos (I tried to check in WMP but I couldn't find anything about streaming; I don't have Realplayer installed either).

The YT help page mentioned an out-of-date Flash player, but I don't think that's my problem since I'm able to see the "Loading video" screen.

I've tried both FF2 and IE7, and YT doesn't work for either.

WinXP SP2 yadda yadda.

― Leee, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 22:15 (nineteen years ago)

every time I connect my ipod to my windows xp box I'm unable to eject it normally because it says the files are "in use by another application". everything Ive looked up says this is due to Norton AntiVirus but I have auto-protection turned off and it still happens. the only way I can ever eject it is either via explorer force eject, or just taking it off the usb dongle anyway and forcing it to restart. anyone else experience this?

― akm, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 22:50 (nineteen years ago)

you guys have stupid problems

― JW, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 23:43 (nineteen years ago)

my problem is stupid but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

― akm, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 23:48 (nineteen years ago)

Norton Antivirus doesn't do shit except lag the crap out of your computer.

― JW, Thursday, 15 March 2007 00:14 (nineteen years ago)

Uninstall Norton, its a giant turd.

Get AVG Free or something.

― Jarlrmai, Thursday, 15 March 2007 01:19 (nineteen years ago)

YouTube is flash. video, so QT and WMP are nothing to do with it, try uninstalling Flash and downloading the lated version and installing it.

And be a little easier on your PC, i'd reccomend just using the Windows firewall.

― Jarlrmai, Thursday, 15 March 2007 01:21 (nineteen years ago)

Weird, now it works without having monkeyed around with anything.

― Leee, Thursday, 15 March 2007 03:01 (nineteen years ago)

Anyone in London got a Macbook Core Duo install Mac OS X install DVD.

― Ed, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 19:25 (nineteen years ago)

one month passes...

my pal has a lacie external HD on which he has spilt curry.

he's in london and is not the most computer-literate. the best thing, i think, would be for him to take it to some kind of repair shop cum data-salvaging service.

can any london ILX0rs recommend such a place (the cheaper the better)?

― grimly fiendish, Monday, 30 April 2007 10:27 (nineteen years ago)

Did the curry get inside?

― Keith, Monday, 30 April 2007 10:29 (nineteen years ago)

i'm assuming so, because he says it ain't working very well.

(i know, i know: this is almost useless information. but i'm in glasgow, and he and his HD are in london.)

― grimly fiendish, Monday, 30 April 2007 12:20 (nineteen years ago)

Rubbish! It was you wasn't it? Go on own up!

― the next grozart, Monday, 30 April 2007 13:31 (nineteen years ago)

hahahah. no. honest.

anyone?

― grimly fiendish, Monday, 30 April 2007 14:56 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.retrodata.co.uk

― stet, Monday, 30 April 2007 14:57 (nineteen years ago)

I found PC Heaven (020 7255 2666) in Fitzrovia to be great - v fast, v cheap and v friendly.

― braveclub, Monday, 30 April 2007 15:26 (nineteen years ago)

ok, so: i need a script management program for osx -- something that will allow me to organize different documents, tag them with notes and/or certain types of metadata (ie. last read, contact info, etc).

this sort of thing has to be available, but i cannae find anything suitable. any suggestions?

― ^@^, Monday, 30 April 2007 15:40 (nineteen years ago)

actually, scratch that -- i don't even really need something that handles the actual documents. i just need a sort of lite database situation that allows me to enter records, tag them, manage and oragnize them. any ideas?

― ^@^, Monday, 30 April 2007 15:52 (nineteen years ago)

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