[Gllug] recommendation for external hard drive

[Hari Sekhon]

Daniel Kingshott wrote:
> I've found the sea agent drives to be hideously annoying when they go into 'sleep' mode and take some time to wake up
A lot of models are like that these days and those types rarely come 
with on/off switches any more. They're mainly aimed at low usage people 
running Windows and powering their PCs up only when they want to play 
something or browse so the drives are minimal effort for those sorts of 
users that they are targeted at as they start up, shut down and spin 
down along following the PC usage pattern. There are utils to control 
that spin down behaviour if I recall correctly, but again, they are 
Windows utils.

If you don't like that "sleep mode", avoid the models without on/off 
switches, buy Iomega instead of Seagate/Maxtor/WD user level consumer 
drives. The models with on/off switches are less likely to have that 
spin down feature - at least I've observed few of these brands I have 
don't spin down when they have switches to control on/off. The Toshiba 
drives have switches too, but I don't like their build as much.

On the other hand, spin down could be a good thing if you're not 
hammering the drives 24/7... will save you some electricity, and green 
is good after all...

-h

ps. say hi to Jonathan for me. :-)

-- 
Hari Sekhon
http://www.linkedin.com/in/harisekhon

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