Hard disc drive portable - which is best?

longtimelurker54

Hi,

Our laptop is creaking along with hardly any capacity on it so we've decided to bite the bullet and buy an external disc drive (to move music and other files on to to free up space on the laptop).

Fairly clueless though about which one to go for. Just looked on Amazon so far and they have a Western Digital My Passport 1TB portable which seems good as it has both USB 3 and USB 2 capability.

We don't need anywhere near 1TB capacity but it seems as if it's best to buy the biggest capacity you can and smaller capacity drives don't seem very different in price.

Just wondering if anyone can throw any light on things to look out for when choosing, where to buy from etc. Also whether Western Digital products are good or if we'd be better choosing a Seagate or A.N. other?

Would be very grateful for any advice/suggestions.

closed

Is the internal disk full?

Moving data won't speed it up if creaking along means slow, and moving data is risky if the external drive fails.

2sides2everystory

I had same problem so bought a couple of new 2.5 inch 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Blacks (with freefall sensor) for £90 all-in on eBay about 9 months ago. I also bought two plastic 2.5 inch SATA drive caddies for three quid each incl. USB cables and p&p. Rather than mess about moving data, I took the drive right out of my laptop (it is very easy with almost all laptops) and popped it into one of the caddies, then put one of the new drives into my laptop, upgraded to Windows 7 and gave my machine a new lease of life entirely as the new drive is pretty fast and quiet as well as nearly three times the capacity of my original drive, and I can just hook up directly via USB to my old drive for anything important still on it.

The extra new drive I put in the second caddy, formatted it as FAT32 and that is now my Media Library and I can even plug it directly into my Sony Bravia USB and play movies directly that way (Bravia will allow this if the drive is FAT32). FAT32 is no good for MKV movies with filesizes over 4GB but I dont have many of those.

My son had a dicky drive in his 2 year old Dell XPS1530 so I bought a third WD Scorpio Black and he got an even better upgrade from it ... he installed Windows 7 64 bit and his laptop is super-slick again.

I thoroughly recommend that drive - there are a number of variants but the Black is the one with the freefall protection.