Firewire external harddrive for Inspiron E1705

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@adamsparks wrote:

What firewire external harddrive would you recommend for an Inspiron E1705? What can I expect to pay for it?

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The model of your computer has no bearing whatsoever on the make/model of external hard drive used except for the interface (firewire or usb). 

The price of an external hard drive is dependent on a lot of things, most importantly SIZE of the drive. 

Some external drives include backup software, some don't.  Maxtor drives should be avoided at all costs.  Leading retailers like CompUSA have external drives on sale regularly, and you can also put an internal drive in an usb/firewire holder and save money that way. 

Thanks. That's helpful.

Also, 3.5" external drives (which are bulkier, heavier, and almost always require an external power supply) are usually much cheaper than 2.5" externals. (So increased physical size = cheaper, increased capacity = more expensive.)

2.5" drives can usually be powered from the USB port, making them much more portable. Firewire drives on the E1705 must be externally powered since the Inspirons have a 4-pin (no power) Firewire port.

The cheapest way to get an external drive is to buy an external enclosure and a standard drive and assemble it yourself, but whether this is viable depends on your skill level. Newegg.com is a great place to buy drives, memory, and enclosures.

adamsparks

What will you be doing on the drive storage? edit video?

I bought 2 enclosures from http://www.cooldrives.com/ One for my DVD recorder and one for a hard drive. Both enclosures support USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 which there are occaisions where I'm glad both enclosures both types.

I highly suggest deciding exactly what you want as far as drive capacity, then going to http://www.pricewatch.com and buy the hard drive then getting an enclosure for it from cooldrives.com (my personal favorite) or wherever you feel comfortable. Todays connectors are practically foolproof so you won't be able to connect incompatabile things. I've put countless hours worth of use on my external hard drive and the enclosure I got was the cheapest available.

Cooldrives.com looks like they'd have a solution to connect any kind of drive (hard drive or optical) to your laptop using USB or Firewire.