500 GB External HD for $179

[Kamal]

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Western-Digital-External-Hard-Drive-WDG1U5000N/sem/rpsm/oid/149941/catOid/-12976/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do

Seems like a hell of a steal.

[Kamal]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

Jesus I just found out my local staples had the same HD for $10 less.... proud to say I am now an owner of 1 of these bad boys

[Hg_addict]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

Wow thats is a deal. Have you used it yet?

[Kamal]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

Yes I plugged it into my laptop and XP instantly recognized it. I am transferring close to 100 gb wirelessly over my network from my desktop but its slow as shit (so much for 802.11g).

It came pre-formatted in FAT32 so the first thing I did was formatted it to NTFS - which took forever. Also its not true 500 GB (about 465) which is a huge surprise. I would've felt it'd be closer to 480 or so - didnt expect losing 35 gigs off it.

[feather]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

35gb is a lot to lose to a filesystem, wtf?

[Kamal]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

unless I have a bad drive - will call WD and see what they have to say

[feather]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

Could be the byte allocation thingie ... can't remember the technical term. But with FAT32 and NTFS, you can control that. I will have a better idea when I can run my Partition Magic at home to see how they refer to what I'm trying to say

[Simon Preston]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

I have a Western Digital 500GB internal drive which is 465GB when formatted with NTFS.

Most harddisk knowingly makers use the 1'000'000'000 bytes = a Gigabyte method which we know is bollocks - as do the HDD makers, but it makes it look better.

[Kamal]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

Good to know, saved me a phone call

[unkownartist]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

god dam it i would have to pay over ?250 for that here

http://froogle.google.co.uk/froogle?q=Western+Digital+External+Hard+Drive+(WDG1U5000N)&hl=en&cr=countryUK%7CcountryGB&um=1&sa=X&oi=froogle&ct=title

gonna get a 500 gig sata II for my desktop though, only costs around ?90

[Simon Preston]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

It would help if you were looking at the same model.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=410992

[Kamal]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

those are diff ? thought they're both 16 MB Buffer / 7200 RPM drives

[Simon Preston]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

But the one you are looking at is the bottom of the range USB 2 only MyBook. The next model up has Firewire 400 and the one up from that includes Firewire 800.

[Kamal]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

I guess I snagged the bottom of the list one

[beanzncheez]

Re: 500 GB External HD for $179

You gotta do the math and you should know that you're not gonna get 500GB (binary) out of it. It even says so on the box at what formula they use. I saw this same drive getting clearanced out by either Staples or Office Depot a while back for like $110 and they sold pretty fast from what I heard. Big drives are fun.
I recently added 2x250GB of Samsung Spinpoint storage drives to my file server for the great price of $138. Awesome price for drives that have faster access times and lower heat levels.