and operating in some way to act as an external Hard disc by putting and operating by connecting to the USB?
Thanks a ton guys will try your advice.
Is it necessary to have a casing?

There are jumper settings( some pins) near the power cable of the hard disk. You can change it to slave or the best is selecting cable select. usually these settings are illustrated on the hard disk. then u can use this hard drive for extra storage. But if you want to use it as a external drive then you will have to buy a casing and fix this with cable select.

Got windows 7… can anyone help in finding how to detect it. thanks

But you yourself stated that when you plug it in via USB, you have no trouble detecting it? What’s the problem?

i just bought this 500gb seagate external hard drive for my mac but i cant seem to transfer any files. i keep getting this window that saids "the item could not be moved bc ‘free agent drive’ cannot be modified" any ideas on wat i can do? i tried going to both seagate and apple sites but i cant find help there either.

You should probably first format the seagate drive. If you go to disc utility, there you can format the hard drive. Once it’s formatted, you should then be able to put files on it. I have the same 500gb seagate external hard drive and I had to format it for macs first before I could use it.

I just recently bought a mac after my PC died, and I want to back up my computer on the external HD (it’s a Maxtor 400GB OneTouch) and Time Machine says I need to reformat it, but I’d rather not lose my old files.

I read about partitioning and I’m not completely sure if it’s a good alternative to formatting. If anyone could give some input, I’d really appreciate it :]

If you partition a hard drive, the new partitions which are created will "usually" be formatted. There are some software that support partitioning without formatting (eg: norton partition magic). But i don’t know if there are any for Mac.

my hdd dvd recorder works with usb memory stick and i want my external hdd to also work thanks

I suggest you read the recorder’s instruction manual first, or you may be disappointed. In many recorders the USB attachment is only for playing still pictures and is not intended for extending the machine’s internal HDD

Hi everyone.
I was just wondering if you could tell me where you can get an external hard drive for a reasonable price. I have a lot of pictures that I am going to put on one, so if you could please give me a store that has them for a good price with a large capacity?
Thanks.

By the way… I do not regularly buy off of eBay.

Check this out. It can be bought in Walmart. Should be good for what you want to do with it. Hope this helps. Good Luck.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Western-Digital-320GB-My-Passport-Essential-Portable-External-Hard-Drive-Black/12547946

I have two seagate external hard drives.I am using windows 7. But when i plug in both the hard drives at the same time through two different usb ports , my system recognises only one of them. So i could’nt transfer data from one drive to other.Plese suggest me some way i can use(get recognised) both of my hard drives at the same time by the system. "Any help greatly appreciated "
note: Both of my drives work fine when connected indivisually.

usually this happens when your power supply unit is not letting proper power supply into usb..
It should be usually 5 volts..

If you are connecting them through any extension cables or hub, connect them directly to computer..
you might have atleast 2 proper usb ports right ??
plug them directly..
If you are given a Y usb cable with the drive, use both ..

Check in disk manager [right click my computer > manage > disk manager ] if your drive is detected and that device manager isn’t showing any yellow exclamations..

reply back about your result..

I thinking about getting the Xbox 360 arcade console which does not include a hard drive. I have an external USB 320GB hard drive and I was wondering if I could connect this to the xbox.

nope

you used to be able to with extensive modding but not microsoft has released a very strict update that will not allow you to plug in any non microsoft branded memory units.

You could get banned from live if you try and mod your way through that

its easy to tell who does it too so I would advise against it

Ill post a link when I find it for you to read the atricle

Which brand or is there any criteria that I should watch out for if i want to buy a good external hard disk. It should be fast in data transfering and have the largest storage possible with the affordable price. What is the current storage at the moment. I’m looking to buy at least 300 gigabytes to store mainly like photo and some video. What is the best brand, affordable and quality-quaranteed external hard disk out there?

Thank you very much for your help.

Well, you are going to want one with USB, so that you can use it on all computers. I suggest buying 500GB because the price difference from 320GB to that isn’t very large. Also, if you feel like spending a little more money, you can get an external hard drive that doesn’t require additional power, i.e. the only cord is the USB one. As far as brands go, I would buy Western Digital or Seagate. Some models you might try are:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148345

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148354

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136318

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136175

I have an iTunes library that I need to put on an external hard drive, about 500gb or less, and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with certain brands. Thanks!
How do I reply to my own question?

Also, what do you mean "backup capabilities"?

No different than internal hard drives. Seagate and Western Digital.