Western Digital My Books are good, but I had one fail on me. That was a very dark day...

 

I'll look into it, or getting a DVD drive, but my computer is old, like I think we got it after XP came out. Very low memory, so I dont want to add stuff to it because sooner or later its going to the dump.

 

I think the WDS externals are pretty good for the money. They even come with software where you set up what you want backed up and with a touch of a button it just copies everything to your external.

 

My computer came with (and still runs) Windows 2000 Professional. It has a sticker that says Windows XP compatible. It came with 2GB of RAM (which is still quite a bit) and a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor which isn't top of the line hardware by any means. This computer runs fine. I routinly take video files I have on my computer and encode them onto DVD. It slows the computer down to the point where I can't use while the encoding is happening, but the computer has no problem encoding. You would be surprised how far a bit of upgrading will get you. My brother currently runs Dual Pentium III (thats right, Pentium III) 1.0GHz processors. He is running Vista Ultimate with 2GB of RAM and can play Madden 2008 without a problem.

 

for externals or internals for that matter, stick with companies like western digital and maxtor who have been around for a long time. the others/cheap ones break down and are returned on a regular basis. if you can read customer reviews online and you should get a good idea why i say stick with the top brands.

 

I have seen alot of hard drives and know about computers. Western digital, seagate, maxtor. i would go 500 gb if you are going to be recording tv. Don't forget to get the high speed cable when you buy the hard drive. If you don't and you are trying to record tv it won't go fast. And you might not be able to do it. I forget what its called but you need a high speed cable it will allow 30gb per second. maybe higher.

 

Cables don't have speeds. The speed of something is determined by teh clock and wires do not have have clock speeds. You should be concerned about the speed of the bus you are transferring through. The two big ones are USB 2.0 and FireWire. FireWire is capable of 400Mbits/S-800Mbits/s. USB 2.0 is capable of 480Mbits/s. Most computers come with USB 2.0 slots but not all computers come with FireWire (my computer does not have FireWire). You can buy PCI cards that have both USB 2.0 and FireWire and install them in your machine. The speed isn't really that important. When you are initially recording a TV show, you will probably record it on to an internal hard drive. This will give you the maximium speed possible as internal hard drivers are faster than USB 2.0 or FireWire. When you move files from the internal hard drive to the external hard drive, it will take longer if you are on USB 2.0 instead of FireWire. However, I don't think this should be too much a problem since the only difference is you will wait longer to move the files over. Unless you are recording onto the external or running programs from the external, speed isn't an issue. You shouldn't record onto an external because most likely it will be faster if you record onto the external hard drive and move it over later.

 

Not always true. Im using a 250gb model off ebay (my 2nd one) thats totally generic and from taiwan. Has worked flawlessly for years.