External Hard Drive 320gb portable

I want to buy a portable external hard drive for back up purposes. I want 320gb USB 2.0 obviously must be Windows 7 compatible and have shortlisted IOMEGA Prestige
at just under £50 and the Western Digital My Passport Essential at about £52. It must not weigh more than 250 gms.

Do any members have any other suggestions or comments please?

Did you know that Seagate/Maxtor has a freeware version of Acronis called "DiscWizard". A backup solution that works with only their drives. Western Digital also has a version they call "Acronis True Image WD Edition". I'm not sure if IOMEGA comes with a backup solution or has available one to download.

Here is a related thread for my post - Backup your Hard Drive with Acronis

However, you may have already known. Good luck with your purchase.

In my opinion all the drives perform about the same as far as performance and reliability. Everyone gets a lemon from time to time which tarnishes the name of that particular brand for them. Thats the price one has to pay in changing versions with hardware as well as software.

suenay, welcome to the forum! What you can do, and it may cost less than buying a pre-built one, is purchasing a SATA hard drive. A 500GB wouldn't cost much more than a 320GB one would. Then you can purchase a case to install it in. It's really easy to do. If you have an eSATA connection on your computer (an extra one), a case with that kind of connection should be purchased.

On the other hand, if you don't want to fool with building one, WD does make good ones, as well as Seagate. The reason I bring up 500GB is the extra cost is minimal, and you may one day need more storage space. Hopefully, this will help offer you other options, and I hope that you find the drive that meets your needs. Should you have any other questions about this issue, feel free to post anytime.

About $90 US dollars... should be able to get a decent external case and a drive for that much money. Probably a 500GB too.

Easy assembly, takes about 5 minutes.

This is from Amazon.co.uk
3.5" SATA HDD to e-SATA and USB Combo External Enclosure Caddy 15.47 British Pounds


Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATAII 16MB Cache 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive OEM WD5000AAKS 39.59 British Pounds

Nibs, I think the portability of a 2.5" drive was the goal.

I wished I'd have seen that case when I bought mine. Probably by year's end, I'm going to do some more upgrading, that eSATA connection would have been useful. c_c showed me a long adapter that will support up to five eSATA devices, I have the page bookmarked.

I plan to remove my hard drive from my computer, I'm going to run a cable to that part, and have three hard drives installed (in external cases). There may be a small bottleneck, but having three drives installed this way will be far better than one internal drive and two USB ones. In fact, I'll only be running one at a time, so I really don't see too much bottlenecking to be concerned with.

My bad... but he didn't state that (I don't think?) in his OP.

I saw the portable, but my synapses didn't fire correctly! I hate it when that happens. LOL!

They did say something about weight, how much is 250 gms anyway? I don't know how to compare grams with a hard drive.

It is surprising how quickly a plug in hard drive can fill up with backups. I use a 1TB Toshiba. It did not cost the earth, look into it on line.

I get all my external hard drives from Freecom and Western Digital. Freecom have a large variete of hard drives, which won't burn a hole in your wallet. WD has a nice software for backing up that comes with it. Samsung also have some nice ones.

For all other memory I go Kingston, but that isn't HDs. Only flash drives and RAM.