For a while now i've been wanting an external harddrive that connects to USB for backing things up or transfering from computer to computer... you know general stuff. I saw a few of them on a site i buy kinda regular from called Play.com for i guess a reasonable price.

I told a friend about this and he said to me to get a external harddrive case, which i wasn't really happy about getting because the only external harddrive case i'd seen means you need to use up a cd drive bay. You then get this other part which you put in the harddrive and then slot it in to part you fix in to the cd bay. This didn't fit what i needed it for.

A few weeks pass and the same friend asked me if i could download somethings for him, so i did. He brought around his external harddrive.. i never knew this was one of his cases he mentioned. I figured it was just a normal external drive like i was going to buy from Play.com.

Skip forward to a few days ago, my friend asks me for computer help with installing a new 250gb drive, windows wasn't detecting it.. it was a simple jumper problem and started formatting away. While i was at his house, i saw something and asked what it was.. he told me it was the external case he told me about. It was almost instant that i realised having one of these would mean almost infinate amount of external storage.

Day 1: This is where the nightmares start.

Yesterday i decided that i'd go and get one of the cases. I checked the website for the shop my friend got it from and phoned them up for a stock check.

"I'm sorry, this item isn't in stock, it won't be until next week."
"ok, thanks"
*hang up phone*
"GAH"

I'd had already made arrangements to get to the shop to pick it up (i can't drive and have no intention to learn right now) and i needed a harddrive anyway. I phoned my friend and asked him where he got the 250gb drive from as i remember him saying it was on offer for £60, and off to PC World we went.

After buying a 250gb drive and some KFC (mmm chicken) we headed home.

It wasn't until this point that i realised that the drive was SATA.. i had planned to just put it in to my friends external case that i borrowed to format and copy over some stuff to it. I really should have checked at this point if the case supported SATA.. sadly i never, this cost me 1-2 hours of messing around... read on.

So, not knowing the case supported SATA, i opened up my PC and connected the drive to it. To save time here lets just say either my bios needs updating, or windows doesn't like the SATA on my motherboard. In otherwords, the drive wasn't found.

Around an hour later after talking to some friends on IRC and MSN. I have no idea why but i decided to have a look at the external case. I then found an SATA connector and quickly hooked up the drive.

"Your new hardware is ready to use"

At this point i was happy and started to do a full format of the drive. About 1:20 hours later the drive was on 100% and sat their for several minutes. I'm kind of impatiant so i done some brute force canceling of the drive and turned off the external case's power.

1:20 hours later, i was back to 100%.. this time i decided to give it a little longer to decide to finish. 40 minutes later i was starting to get pissed off, and said on IRC.

"This drive has 5 minutes, or its going back to the shop".

About 10 seconds after saying this the drive finished being retarded and the formatting stopped. At this point was really happy.. all this time i'd spent waiting for the drive to be setup was really getting to me.

So, i moved some files over to it and the copying dialog kinda froze.. "uh oh" i kinda thought and turned off the drive power, and then back on and continued to copy files... it froze again.

"GAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

So i deleted the partition and packaged it all up again.

Day 2: (Today) Windows XP says "300gb? wtf is that?"

With it being Sunday, PC World doesn't open until 11:00am. My dad who was taking me to return the drive had to be some place at 11:30. The drive to PC World is 10 mile each way.

We left the house at 10:40 and were about 4-5 mile in to the journey when i said "Oh shit, i forgot the receipt". We turned around and headed back home... there was no way we could make it there and back for 11:30.

So i then phoned my sisters husband and he agree'd to drive there. So, we got to PC World and i still needed another drive, so i replaced the 250gb SATA drive with a 300gb UltraDMA PATA drive with a difference of £25. At this point i really didn't care about cost, i wanted a working drive.

Headed home and put the drive in to my brothers PC to set it up. Windows XP detected the drive as 128gb (GAH) so i checked online and found that XP (without SP1) has limit of 128gb.

Kind of interesting news to me because i have already a drive in my own computer that should be 200gb but was formatted to 128gb. But this can wait.. i'm sick of formatting drives.

I downloaded SP1 and copied it to my brothers PC with my thumb drive (mp3 player really) and installed it all. The drive was then found at 300gb and formatted nicely with just a "quick format".

As i've been writing this my new 300gb drive is working away in the external case backing up some files. Lets just hope when i get my own case, it'll be problem free.. heres to next week.

Thanks for reading, i'm off to watch my drive fill up :)

Big hard drive to fill up with even more roms, most of which you'll never even play huh  ;)

roms? what are roms?!?!  ??? ::)

Wow thats quite an adventure, its fun to talk about that stuff afterwords, but during its kinda a nightmare, I hope the hardrive works out for you.

heh thanks, i've had no problem so far except for the current free space being down to 185gb already.. yeah, i had a lot of stuff to back up :P

By the way, incase anyone is interested the external case... or "external enclosure" as they are apprantly called is by Enermax. It is the "Enermax Laureate" i believe.

Indeed, quite an adventure! I like stories with a good ending.



I think wolverine meant CD-roms with his roms (games and such?)

Is there anyway to stop this from happening without manually deleting each post?  Is there a way to find out who is posting the messages (if it is in fact one person)?  Or is this some sort of automated thing?  I'm sure it's bugging other people as well...

I'm having the same issue on my website which caused me to close down my guestbook and install one of those annoying captcha systems on comments/reviews on my site. You can stop about 75% by continously updating a blacklist of keywords like 'viagra', 'phentermine' and stuff but this means you constantly need to update this list. And you can't really block keywords like 'mp3' or 'black jack' as those can quite well relate to Eo games.

Bots are getting more and more intelligent and it's pretty much a loosing battle to stop them completely. I've seen ads some time ago from people who want to type in captcha's for $0.40/hour.

PS, I ordered a 250gb HD last weekend as a birthday present for myself :).

Can't we get that thing where it displays a gif containing a code that's all a bit bendy and wonky, and you have to type that in to post your comment?

It seems quite common these days, although I guess the problem might be that it isn't free.