need a durable portable storage device

[Regal1975]

It looks like i will be spending some time in the desert for a few months to a year and i figure before i go i should stock up on as many movies etc as i can for entertainment. My measly 30g Hard drive on my laptop wont hold much in the way of full length movies.. Ive looked around and the prices on the seagate external drives is reasonable and they have good reviews, but ive sene where people say to only look at the rather expensive 2.5" laptop drives for anything that might take any abuse... how much abuse will a normal external drive take?? and are there any conventional external drives that are usb powered?

im looking for something around or less than about 160 dollars and asmuch space as humanly possible in a durable reliable product

Thanks

 

[heartsurgeon]

seems self-evident that you should just bring along the DVD's to watch, rather than try to store them on a hard drive..

get a dvd player and some dvd's is my advice.

 

[Regal1975]

well the only problem is that dvds dont do so well in iraq....get stolen are hard to store when you have nowhere to put them, melt, etc... dvds are NOT an option nor is me buying a hundred of them to take along when i can just copy dvds onto a hard drive...

 

[DaveSimmons]

You probably should get the 2.5" since laptop drives are designed to be moved around, desktop drives are not.

If you encode the movies to divx you can fit maybe 1 movie per GB, or with low bitrate MPEG2 maybe 1 movie per 2 GB. www.doom9.net and www.dvdrhelp.com have some articles on divx / MPEG4 encoding.