Talk:External hard disk drive

message: - I have added some extra thing to the list of "Manufacturers of external hard disks/drives", can somebody categorized them, because I don't understand too much about what each company does, I just happen to have a list handy while I doing a report. Try not to remove external SSD manufacture out of there just categorize them, because those information are hard to find. Well if you really feel that exteranl SSD shouldn't be on there, then categorized them and just paste it onto my user page. Thanks people. --Ramu50 (talk) 01:08, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notice 

message: *In the intro, IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics which is an interface, not for Integrated Development Environment which is a software for writing software. --YoRio (talk) 15:52, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Correction Made to the Introduction

message: *Absolutely not. These are completely different ideas. An external hard drive typically refers to just a single drive while a disk enclosure can contain many drives (I've seen as many as 15 but there are probably some that hold more). --Pboyd04 21:52, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If there is no objection, I'm going to restart this article (and fix the relevant redircts to point to it), covering the fact that a disk enclosure is a part of an external hard disk. huji—TALK 13:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge Discussion

message: The article claims that "By 1980, internal drives became the system of choice for computers running Windows." That doesn't make any sense, because the Windows operating system wasn't around in 1980. This needs to be fixed. —Lowellian (reply) 01:20, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Updated it to By the end of 20th century huji—TALK 16:52, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Factual problem

message: Lacie sells external hard drives that have 4TB. Under the history heading, at the end (the last sentence), it says: "Currently the commercial external hard disks of the highest capacity are usually found at 1 TB or 1.5 TB from manufacturers such as Hitachi, SimpleTech, Western Digital, Seagate, CMS, RecoNdata, Maxtor and LaCie" - I think that it should be changed.
See http://www.lacie.com/au/products/family.htm?id=10007
and http://www.lacie.com/au/products/product.htm?pid=10952
--Panyé El Skat-e-board-ér (talk · contribs) 05:07, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: While it's true that units of up to 10TB are available, these are simply multi-disk units, with no single disk exceeding the current maximum of 2TB. timrem (talk) 04:17, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  LaCie 

message: I'm thinking under the Compatibility section, to mention the format of a hard drive. Since FAT32 is rarely used for drives larger than about 32GB, most flash drives use FAT32 to insure wide compatibility with operating systems. Since external hard drives are a much larger capacity, users usually will have to pick either NTFS (windows) or HFS (Mac). Since these are more "exclusive" formats, a NTFS formatted drive will only be readable by mac (not writable), while a HFS formatted drive will not be detected by a Windows system at all. --Joey H
I believe this is worth mentioning under compatibility, as there are issues with compatibility for users who frequently go between windows and mac computers, and having two partitions on the drive tends not to be an usable solution.
:I'm not sure why you're saying that multiple partitions isn't usable - Works just fine for some. That said, there was perfectly adequate and quite brief language covering the topic above in this article that was stricken in the last two weeks. If you want to hit the page's History link and check 'em out, there may be some langauge that warrants a revert. This is not file system and this is not hard drive, and anything we can put here would be redundant to what's already there, so please don't expand it past where it was. That said, you're right: it wouldn't hurt to have a sentence or two. Would add valuable context to readers unfamiliar with the topic and who might expect a greater distinction between external and internal storage media than actually exists, or be wholly unaware of the distinction. MrZaiustalk 06:46, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, but you can have any number of FAT partitions and there is write support for NTFS in OSX through a system like FUSE. That said, the Wikipedia isn't a HOWTO guide, it's an encyclopedia, and this isn't an article on dual-booting. Again, though, it wold make sense to add in some very basic mention of FS support and OS compatibility here to add context for unfamiliar readers. I'll try and drop in a decent sentence on the subject. MrZaiustalk 06:53, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

text: Thanks to the person who fixed it! Zeniff 06:19, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Compatibility