i hadnt been in Staples (office supply store in the u.s.) for quite some time. i had a little money burning a hole in my pocket, so thought i'd drop in. inevitibably i always go buy the computer hardware section and was plesantly surprised to find a whole new line of harddrives at very reasonable prices. the new line is a new line of external drives, both from maxtor and western digital. these are terrabyte drives. yup, terrabyte. 1 TRILLION byte drives. there were also several smaller sizes from 750 gig, 500 gig and on down. the prices were around $450 for the terrabytes, which is pretty reasonable for an external of that size.

i didnt buy one, myself, but i did buy a Seagate 500 gigabyte internal. this was bought solely on the basis of Seagates five year warranty, which i believe is currently the best in the low end business (low end being 1 terrabyte or smaller). the price for the internal 500 was $150, which is also a very good price. that's like 33 cents per gig or so.

now, others may have other reasons for getting an external, but mine is backups. externals are slower, using usb or firewire. but they have the advantage of being hot dockable. hot dockable or hot mountable means that you can have your pc up and running already and turn on the external even after windows is loaded up and your pc will quickly recognize the device. turn the drive off and it will undock or unmount from the pc. this makes it an excellent device for backups. if you have something like Norton Ghost installed on your pc and windows is up and running, you simply turn on the external drive, run ghost to do the backup, and turn the external back off. this saves the drive motors, electronics and so on and gives a very long life to the drive.

so, harddrives are cheap, but your programs, images, songs and other data files may be priceless. back them up!

I noticed Frys (in Seattle) has a 1.5TB external HD in their ad this week for $459. Holy cow...

Why are external drives slower RPM-wise than the internals?

danny, nice. staples only had them up to one terrabyte and that' s a great price.

externals are slower because they dont need to be faster. that sounds like double talk maybe, but usb and firewire, the current means of transfer to and from the computer, are MUCH slower that your ide or sata ports. so, the rpms only have to be as good as the transfer rate of usb or firewire.

internal harddrives, on the other hand, are VERY fast and that disk needs to spin at a high rate to keep up with the speeds available on the transfer rate.

or, at least, that's my take on it. gary could probably give you a more precise, or different, or better reason.

Why buy something in a Staples when there is a far wider variety and better prices on the internet?

I have 3 external HDs which I use for 1 customer photos. 2 my photos and junk, 3 back up the computer. The advantage I have with the externals is they only need to be connected when I need them therefore they are not open for viruses and corruption all the time. I'm lucky enough to have enough USB ports that they can stay plugged in but not turned on. Hopefully this set up will save me having millions of discs hanging around.
I also have 2 internal drives one is soley used as a scratch disk for photoshop.
You could say I'm a HD junkie. :-)

Only thing I'll say about external drives is don't go plugging them into anyone else's computer, and don't let anyone else plug their drive into yours.

There's currently a spate of infections doing the rounds that spread by means of plug in drives. Mostly small key drives, but they'll happily spread to and use a full sized backup disk.

Just like the old days when most viruses were spread by infected floppy discs, these infections have reverted to this means of propagation. Most AVs are not detecting them well, and they're very difficult to remove.

They're mostly active in colleges and such, where file transfer on key drives is commonplace.

ant, there is actually a very good reason for buying from a local store... quick returns. a fairly recent example of this was this computer i'm using now. the original motherboard was bad, the original harddrive was bad, and there were installation hassles that boggled the mind. by buying locally, retail, it only took several days to handle as opposed to a possible several weeks. that was well worth the possible savings in price from buying online. i almost always buy hardware locally, if i can get it, for just this reason.