I'm in the market for a USB HDD, probably about 500GB's. I was looking at newegg, and here are a couple of the contenders:

Newegg.com - Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 U01H500 (STM305004EHAB01-RK) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - Retail

Newegg.com - Fantom Titanium-II TFD500U16 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - Retail

Those two looked decent. I was leaning toward the Fantom, looks pretty cheap and reliable.

Does anyone have any recommendations or ideas for USB HDD's? $120 is probably my max price range. Thanks.

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Well on Kam's recommendation, I went with a drive that has eSATA and USB 2 connections. I purchased this one:

Newegg.com - Cavalry “Pre-Formatted� CAXM37500 500GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache USB 2.0 / eSATA 3.0Gbps External Hard Drive - Retail

It's hotswappable/has on-off switch for HDD/fan/has eSATA/USB 2 connections/Western Digital Drive inside enclosure/external power supply/indicator light/comes with USB and SATA cables/preformatted to NTFS.

Sounds too good to be true for $130. The main complaints were it didn't always come with the stand or eSATA brackets. Those problems are supposed to be easily rectified by contacting the calvary website. It was $30 cheaper than bigger names like Seagate, hopefully it lasts me for awhile.

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Hope you like it. Make sure you give us a nice little review when you get it. I have two WD My Book's (one at work and one at home) and i love them. When i go on business trips i use to have to copy all of my files and folders to a DVD or CD to take with me. Then i got this and started being able to just take it instead. Then of course i went even smaller and bought a 4GB flash drive and now i just have to carry that

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Will do Steimy. Kam's recommendation was Seagate. Independent reviews said the same thing, that the Seagate Free Agent Pro is top of the line.

But this one was $30 cheaper, came with all the parts necessary for eSATA, and has a WDD inside. So if the enclosure sucks, then I'll just install it internally. I forgot I have a PCI SATA card from when I tried to flash my 360. So I will install that and use the eSATA connections, should be much faster than my IDE HDD. 1.5GB/s vs 480MB/s, sounds good.

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I have a little of everything in mine right now.One external USBOne internal IDEand two internal SATA, oops make that one because i forgot my Seagate died on me and needs to be replaced whenever i can find some extra cash. I could use another good 500GB SATA. But i do not store nearly as much as i did back in my PS2 and Xbox hayday. I had whole drives full of fairly large files . I am such a pack rat. I finally decided that it was ok to get rid of them since i do not even have my modded PS2 anymore, or any of my games. Although i kept the Xbox, no way i was getting rid of that.

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Yeah I'm looking forward to the storage, lots of XviD's are what take up most of my space. I'm getting ready to watch Season 7 of Voyager, and each of the eps is 350MB's! My master HDD is only 40GB's, so the storage this drive offers is way overdue. All downloads are going to the external from now on, and no more constantly having to burn stuff to disc to clear space on my Xbox HDD. Plus since it's eSATA, it will be much faster than IDE, the drive should be 2 or 3 times as fast as my primary HDD, especially since there won't be any OS installed. I may also try dual booting with Linux, provided that is possible from an external HDD.

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i know you can boot to a USB device i don't see why not a eSATA, but it is so stupid how you have to set those up, everytime i've tryed you've had to use windblows to install the files to it, you have to the disk ISO, explore the disk and find out what files you need to copy, so, you might need to look up a tutorial on how to do it, unless XS already has one, because i know you can't just put the linux disk in your computer and try to install it to a hard drive thats external (not sure if you can install it like that to an eSATA disk, youll have to find that out yourself)

just though i'd give my 2 cents

-Bryce

Yeah iono about setting up a boot partition to the external. It can be done but seems like there are way too many bad things that can happen. If anyone wondered this sucker is still kicking strong, all my HD content and media is on the external run through eSATA and the speeds and stability are great.

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