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@anettis wrote:
I wish to get an external hard drive for my Inspiron 8600. I want to connect it to the APR via USB2 so that I don’t have to play connect/disconnect games every time I undock. I realize firewire is faster in real world tests, but I want the unit plugged into the APR instead of directly into the laptop. I have read professional reviews and I see the Maxtor One-Touch drives seem to be rated highly and DELL seems to be pushing them as an option on laptop sales. However when I look at user reviews of these drives I see reports of them running hot and failing.

Can anyone who had experience with a DELL laptop and Maxtor One-Touch drive comment on their experience with the drive? And if anyone has any other external drive recommendations I am open to suggestion.

Thanks,

Tony

Unless the external drive comes with its own power source, it will NOT work hooked to the APR, as Dell provides no additional power to those ports.  Howeve,r the One Touch drives do have their own power supply, so it will work fine.

Note that Maxtor drives in general lately have been problematic, so you may want to find a usb case and a WD or Seagate drive, but ONLY if the case has it's own PSU. 

I have a laptop drive in a case and it will not run off my 600m's APR, but runs fine connected directly.

After reading a lot of reviews online, I decided to go with the Seagate External Drive with both USB 2.0 and Firewire.  If you type Maxtor One Touch and Seagate External into Google, you will find alot of reviews and all of them favor the Seagate.  I had been using a Acomdata external drive and it started producing write errors after just under a year of moderate use.  I decided reliability would be the most important factor this time and the Seagate External had an impeccable review record.  The reliability factor was impressed on me even more when my internal drive started to give up this past weekend after 3 years.

Seagate produces a 160GB and 200GB external drive, both in dual USB 2.0 and Firewire configurations.

elaiw,

Thanks for the info about the Seagate External. I was wondering about power management with this drive – does it spin down after a certain amount of time not being accessed or does it somehow know to spin down when your laptop HD does the same or do you simply have to shut it off manually when not in use?

Tony

I park the heads manually by stopping it with the Device Manager in the lower right of the screen.  It's simple enough and I know the heads park that way.  There might be another way to manage it but I'm not aware of any.  I chalk it up to one of the minor inconveniences associated with an external drive.

Are you saying the drive won't spin down into a standby mode even if the drive is not accessed for many hours?  I would have hoped it would spin down on its own once a certain threshold of inactivity is passed - perferrably the threshold established in Windows power management.

Tony 

No, it definitely spins down by itself after a certain amount of time.  I just have not tracked when it spins down.  I use it primarily for backup and as a scratch disk for multimedia storage so I use it only moderately and usually shut it down by stopping it after I do what I need to do.  I think it is 20 minutes or whatever the power options are but I am not exactly sure.