I have two external hard drives, both Western Digital. One has its own power source; the other is powered by USB. Both are 1 TB and I have never had a problem. Pooh Bear ==================== This was sent to me thru one of my Yahoo groups: As I have been going through my archived data discs I have been coming across several of them that have become bad over the years and thus I cannot get anything off of them. There are photos and videos that were on some of them that I cannot replace:-( So, I made an account at an online file storage site to save my precious files to the cloud to help save from disc deterioration. As I was looking around to see what my options were for storing my sensitive data I came across this site and found it interesting. The discs are pricey (about ~$3 a disc) but they are known as the '1000 year disc.' It takes a special burner to burn them. The DVD Burner is like $40 at Best Buy so you can probably find it even cheaper somewhere else if you shop around. Not sure if there are any retail sellers for the M-Discs though. I didn't dig too deep trying to find anything. Check out the site because it is interesting. They say it is like burning the data into a rock, lol! Anyway, I found this a while back and thought I would share it with you real quick while I had the time:-) M-DISC, Write Once and Read Forever. You might feel like you're making a "permanent" backup of your files when you copy them onto a DVD or backup to a computer hard-drive, but the truth is these devices suffer from natural decay and degradation. Current DVD technology uses organic dyes and low laser power to make marks on the data layer of a standard recordable DVD. Over time, these marks become unreadable because organic dyes degrade when exposed to minimal levels of light, heat, and humidity. This means all the data you thought was safely stored could be lost because the discs you used have an average lifespan of only about 3 to 5 years! Why would you risk your data based on an average; hundreds of discs taken into account in that average were corrupt and unreadable after only a few months. With Millenniata, we don't subject you to the possibility of losing your data. When we say "Write Once and Read Forever", we mean it. Here is a link that might be useful: http://millenniata.com/m-disc/

I may be wrong, but I think you can only use external drives as main drives if they're SCSI or SATA. If you're dealing with USB devices, they're too slow. Some programs will not install on external drives. I may be misreading Ravencajun's last sentence. If you're looking for an external drive, you want to make sure you get something that is a portable drive. It would probably include all the cables. For a laptop replacement drive, you don't need the cables. What is probably the easiest way to upgrade a laptop hard drive is to get one of these EZupgrade enclosures with a drive. The nice thing about the enclosure is that it will work for either SATA or ATA. It includes software so that you can basically do the image and restore in one step, then just swap drives. Since your laptop is 5 years old and had a 6 gb drive to start, it's probably ATA/IDE/EIDE rather than SATA. You could get something like this with the EZ upgrade for less than $100. You'd put the new drive in the enclosure, run the software to clone the drive, turn everything off, pull the current drive, put in the new one and if all goes well, you can just start right up.

This happened to me 5 months ago. Everything lost. New computer also. I sent my hard drive to California to a co. called Drive Savers ( i think). They first look over the drive to see if anything is recoverable, if not they don't charge anything. if there are recoverable files it can be anywhere from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars to recover. My drive turned out to be shot, nothing recoverable. Thousands of pics lost. I would have paid to have them back. But we did have a limit we would have gone to. Pictures are almost priceless. Thankfully I had downloaded many to Photobucket & had many of them on DH's compute as well. Good luck, I feel for you for sure. It is a sinking feeling to see that blank , blue screen.

Reformatted! That's scary. If you do manage to recover files, likely it will be fragments of files. It depends on what happened during formatting. If partitions got moved, many files are busted. If the new partitons (end of sector flags) fell where the old partitiosn were, many files can be recovered. Here's what should have been done to insure maximum recovery of files. Do not do anything that causes a 'write' to the disk. Remove the hard drive and put it in a cartridge designed to convert a hard drive into an external drive. Set its jumper to be slave, or follow instructions for the converter device. Connect it to a working computer and boot that computer. If the computer is able to recognize the drive, you are part way home. It may report that one of your drives needs repairing and asks your permission to do so. [When the comptuer crashed, it left a bunch of files open along with temporary files. These need to be cleaned up] When it asks, answer, yes. If the HD is in working order, the good computer should be able to clean up the files and close all open ones. After that, use my computer to look at a listing of the files on it. You may find that most of your data files are intact. One warning. Before you connect the now external drive to a good computer, make sure that a good anti-virus program is installed and operable. After the external drive has been auto-cleaned, it might be a good idea to immediately scan the drive before anything else. If this does not work, and it may not since the drive has been re-formated, you next option is to try recovery software or pay dearly for a recovery service.