Thinkpads Forum

Hi I'm looking for an external HD around 250gigs, USB II that I can use to with my TP. Can I use any HD for rescue and Recovery?
Any suggestions? Or anything I should know about.

Thanks.

I haven't had much luck using rescue and recovery. I went with a 3rd party program - Acronis v.8. I've heard that the current version (9) was released a bit early. I had bought it over a year ago - so v.8 at the time was the latest version. Anyways, it has served me well and has recovered my drive flawlessly a few times already. I've heard that previous versions of norton ghost some times had problems restoring an image (my brother had ghost and it failed on him multiple times). try searching this forum for either backup or drive image.

You may want to go with an internal HD and buy your own HD enclosure. You can get all of the parts from newegg.com and it'll probably save you a bunch of $$. I just upgraded the HD in my TP from 60 gig to 100 gig. I took the old 60 gig drive, and threw it into a Vantec enclosure from newegg. Even though this was my first time doing this, it didn't take more than 5 minutes - and I was good to go. It was very easy. Lots of other people have done this - I learned how by searching this forum.

I'll pretty much second exactly what hnq said. Acronis True Image is fantastic software. I never do any major system updates without quickly making a new image first, because if something goes wrong, you can always be back in business in 30 minutes. I have been using True Image 9 for nearly a year now with no issues.

I also agree that Newegg is a great place to buy a bare drive and an external enclosure to put it in.

I've been using a Maxtor OneTouch 120 GB for several years, never a problem.

I just bought a SimpleTech 400 GB NAS which I'm liking more and more. And it can be expanded with additional USB drives. It's a honey - it has a Seagate Momentus 7200.1 in it.