advice needed - external hard drive

jemw

Hi Guys

Currently, I am running out of storage space on my laptop (Sony Vaio VGN-FE11M). I've deleted as much as I can, but there's still limited space remaning.

I've come to the conclusion that I need to get an external hard drive. But I don't know exactly what I need to look for in terms of specification?

The main culprits taking up my memory = music and photos!! Can anyone make any suggestions of what I need to buy?

Thanks in advance!
Jemw

The_Grandmaster

The size you need, you probably will need to decide yourself. How much music/ photos do you have? I presume a 500GB would be suitable or even 1TB?

closed

Music can be replaced, but photo's can't, If they are important to you, don't store your only copy of photo's (or any important data) on an external drive, back them up, as a drive can fail at any time.

What size is your internal hard disk, and how much free space have you got.

CHR15

They're all much of a muchness. It really depends on your budget.

These kind of posts ramble on for pages about different models.
Personally,I don't touch any hard drive with Hitachi on it

the next guy wont touch a Maxtor, the next guy won't touch Seagate, the next won't touch Western Digital etc etc...

We all get our fingers burnt when one goes belly up. A manufacturers guarantee simply means they will replace it if it fails, it doesn't mean it won't fail.

jemw

HI Guys

thanks

My current laptop has 100gb memory

Re backing up - i know this is something I *really* need to do. so do I do a backup on the new harddrive or do I have to buy something else to do the back up - like loading the photos onto a DVD?

googler

jemw wrote: »

My current laptop has 100gb memory

Re backing up - i know this is something I *really* need to do. so do I do a backup on the new harddrive or do I have to buy something else to do the back up - like loading the photos onto a DVD?

SO if you buy a 250Gb external, you can back up all your music and photos to that drive, and have 150Gb room for more.

If you buy two 250Gbs, you can move all your music & photos to one of them, liberating space on the laptop, and you can copy the music and photos to the other as a backup.

When you have the external drive connected, you can just copy/paste music files or photo files (or the folders containing them) from the laptop drive to the external (or between the externals)

closed

For important data ,one copy on the original hard disk, one or more on DVD, one on external hard disk. If you get a largish external hard disk, use disk imaging software to backup the lot including windows.

If you really need more space and can't trim your data, (100GB is a lot of mp3's, how often do you actually listen it all?), replace the internal hard disk with a bigger one, and have a usb drive for backup.

Try ccleaner, it might free up some space.

JasX

I think the main consideration is do you want:

a 3.5" external drive (large/size of a big book, needs mains power connection, much larger capacity- 1 to 2TB and cheaper per Gigabyte)

a 2.5" external drive (small/pocket sized, USB powered from laptop so no mains power needed, generally smaller capacity -100 to 500GB and more expensive per Gigabyte)

weegie.geek

100GB isn't too bad. I'd have a "live" backup on the external drive, and buy some blank DVDs to back things up onto periodically. 100GB's worth of top quality blank DVDs will cost you about a fiver, given that 100 verbatim single layer discs will cost £20-ish.