External Hard drive

[strawberrycheesecake]

I basically want another hard drive to put all my movies on that are now cluttering up m computer (I'm not a great fan of DVDs). Can anyone suggest a good one (from PC World etc), and can you play the movie straight from the hard drive or not?

[twist3d]

yes, you can play the movies straight from the external drive (assumed that it is connected to your computer, that is ;D). I have 7200rpm 80gb maxtor diamondmax 16 (backup drive) in q-tec's external casing and seagate 7200.7 160gb (movies & mp3's) in hp's external casing. I suggest you get cheap & reliable IDE-hard drive and buy casing for it. Plusses are that you get full 3-year warranty for the disk (Seagate gives 5-years if I remember correctly?). The retail externals usually have only 1 or 2 year warranty.
here is the link to q-tec cases (many manufacturer's make these also): http://www.qtec.info/products/group.htm?pc=MOBILE-STORAGE
(the 2,5" inch units usually get their power from usb-port so they don't need power plugs)

[Nematocyst]

IMO, a good solution is an external enclosure 5.25" combined with a swappable drive bay. If you wait around for good HD deals, this is the cheapest solution by far. Also, if you want to be able to easily swap drives, this works well. I prefer swapping drives to having more enclosures, but certainly it's doable to have a separate enclosure for each new drive.

One caveat to this approach is it is rather important to select a swappable bay that fits properly in the enclosure. But in terms of flexibility and maintainence, I think it works quite well.

[CWR03]

Speaking of swappable drives, I've run across a couple of different types that would make that simpler. A typical in-bay IDE enclosure cannot be removed when the system is powered up, but there are now internal enclosures that use USB 2.0 with an IDE hard drive, which means that by simply disconnecting the device with the tray icon it can be removed without turning off the system. There are already some SATA enclosures that can do the same thing, but they require both an SATA hard drive and an interface for the PC.