Talk:External hard disk drive

Article merged: See old talk-page here

Notice
- I have added some extra thing to the list of "Manufacturers of external hard disks/drives", can somebody categorized them, because I don't understand too much about what each company does, I just happen to have a list handy while I doing a report. Try not to remove external SSD manufacture out of there just categorize them, because those information are hard to find. Well if you really feel that exteranl SSD shouldn't be on there, then categorized them and just paste it onto my user page. Thanks people. --Ramu50 (talk) 01:08, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Correction Made to the Introduction

 * In the intro, IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics which is an interface, not for Integrated Development Environment which is a software for writing software. --YoRio (talk) 15:52, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
 * ‏Good catch! huji— TALK 08:34, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Merge Discussion

 * Absolutely not. These are completely different ideas. An external hard drive typically refers to just a single drive while a disk enclosure can contain many drives (I've seen as many as 15 but there are probably some that hold more). --Pboyd04 21:52, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Personally, I think this is being looked at backwards. USB_enclosure and External hard drive should have been merged into the now deleted |disk enclosure.  If I have time over the next couple of days, I'll take a stab at doing just that.  External hard-drives, disk enclosures, and USB enclosures all refer to the same thing, but only the terms Disk Enclosure or External Disk Enclosure are inclusive enough to cover their use w/optical drives.

Still nothin' here that isn't covered there, 'cept for one image. Merged that in and redirected - WP:BOLD and all that. MrZaius talk  17:23, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
 * On a related note, will also redirect USB CDROM, USB DVD-ROM, USB DVD, USB HDD, USB Hard Drive, USB DVD Burner, USB CD Burner, and External CDROM, External DVD-ROM, External DVD, External HDD, External Hard Drive, External DVD Burner, External CD Burner there.
 * MrZaius talk  17:19, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with earlier statements that this should definitely not have been merged. Instead, the article should simply have been further developed. A disk enclosure is part of an external hard drive; they are definitely not synonymous. HoCkEy PUCK 18:35, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
 * If there is no objection, I'm going to restart this article (and fix the relevant redircts to point to it), covering the fact that a disk enclosure is a part of an external hard disk. huji— TALK 13:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Factual problem
The article claims that "By 1980, internal drives became the system of choice for computers running Windows." That doesn't make any sense, because the Windows operating system wasn't around in 1980. This needs to be fixed. &mdash;Lowellian (reply) 01:20, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Updated it to By the end of 20th century huji— TALK 16:52, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

LaCie
Lacie sells external hard drives that have 4TB. Under the history heading, at the end (the last sentence), it says: "Currently the commercial external hard disks of the highest capacity are usually found at 1 TB or 1.5 TB from manufacturers such as Hitachi, SimpleTech, Western Digital, Seagate, CMS, RecoNdata, Maxtor and LaCie" - I think that it should be changed.

See http://www.lacie.com/au/products/family.htm?id=10007 and http://www.lacie.com/au/products/product.htm?pid=10952

--Panyé El Skat-e-board-ér (talk · contribs) 05:07, 25 June 2008 (UTC)


 * While it's true that units of up to 10TB are available, these are simply multi-disk units, with no single disk exceeding the current maximum of 2TB. timrem (talk) 04:17, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Honestly, that seems like a stronger rationale for change than not. If the language lacks enough nuance to allow for multi-disk chassis, it does need to be cleaned up. MrZaius talk  05:52, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Compatibility
I'm thinking under the Compatibility section, to mention the format of a hard drive. Since FAT32 is rarely used for drives larger than about 32GB, most flash drives use FAT32 to insure wide compatibility with operating systems. Since external hard drives are a much larger capacity, users usually will have to pick either NTFS (windows) or HFS (Mac). Since these are more "exclusive" formats, a NTFS formatted drive will only be readable by mac (not writable), while a HFS formatted drive will not be detected by a Windows system at all. --Joey H

I believe this is worth mentioning under compatibility, as there are issues with compatibility for users who frequently go between windows and mac computers, and having two partitions on the drive tends not to be an usable solution.
 * I'm not sure why you're saying that multiple partitions isn't usable - Works just fine for some. That said, there was perfectly adequate and quite brief language covering the topic above in this article that was stricken in the last two weeks. If you want to hit the page's History link and check 'em out, there may be some langauge that warrants a revert. This is not file system and this is not hard drive, and anything we can put here would be redundant to what's already there, so please don't expand it past where it was. That said, you're right: it wouldn't hurt to have a sentence or two. Would add valuable context to readers unfamiliar with the topic and who might expect a greater distinction between external and internal storage media than actually exists, or be wholly unaware of the distinction. MrZaius  talk  06:46, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

While multiple partitions may work for some, it isn't practical for moving information. Since Macs can only read NTFS, and Windows can not even detect HFS/Journal, there is no practical and easy way to move files between a NTFS partition and a HFS partition. Furthermore, if you pay for a 250GB drive, and have to split it in half, you may use up space on the NTFS partition faster than the HFS, therefore leaving you with a full Windows partition, and 100GB free space on the Mac partition that you can't use. Since there is rarely a way to predict space usage, you're gonna run out of space on one partition long before the other. --Joey H
 * Sure, but you can have any number of FAT partitions and there is write support for NTFS in OSX through a system like FUSE. That said, the Wikipedia isn't a HOWTO guide, it's an encyclopedia, and this isn't an article on dual-booting. Again, though, it wold make sense to add in some very basic mention of FS support and OS compatibility here to add context for unfamiliar readers. I'll try and drop in a decent sentence on the subject. MrZaius  talk  06:53, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

The end of this sentence in the Compatibility section doesn't make any sense to me. I don't even know why it mentions Hitachi at all and I think it has some grammar problems too: "Obsolete systems such as Windows 98 (original edition)[6], Windows NT (any version before Windows 2000), old versions of Linux (older than kernel 2.4), or Mac OS 8.5.1 or older do not support them out-of-the-box, but may depend on later updates or third party drivers newer versions of hard drive are made be hitachi and go up the space of one terrabyte." Zeniff 20:29, 14 May 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by ZeniffMartineau (talk • contribs)
 * Thanks to the person who fixed it! Zeniff 06:19, 1 August 2010 (UTC)