external hard drive

crystal9

Hi,

I wondered if anyone could point me in the right direction and recommend an external hard drive please.

my laptop is running slow (thats another story to which i do have a post about) but what i thought i would do is transfer all my pictures off the laptop onto a hard drive and then hopefully it will keep it clutter free.

any advice would be great thanks

droopsnoot

I have a number of external drives without any problems or anything much to distinguish between them. Main difference is between desktop drives (which have a mains power adapter and portable drives (which power themselves from the USB if your machine can do that, most can). I prefer the latter, but they're usually a little smaller and a little dearer due to using 2.5" drives.

closed

moving them to another drive won't speed it up. If they are important it's better to keep them there, and make a copy onto dvd and or external drive for backup purposes.

have a look on ebuyer/amazon etc, get one big enough to backup your laptop hard disk.

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=price+ascending&subcat=3267&cat=393&store=33&cat=&subcat=3267&page=1

if your machine supports usb3, have a look at usb3 drives.

OneADay

Get a solid state hard drive (2.5 inch external), much safer than the standard moveable drives. I have had a fair few normal go bad just through moving them or using them. Normal drives heat up too much and there is the risk of dropping them and then they go bust.

closed

safer until they fail, then you have no chance of recovery

OneADay

closed wrote: »

safer until they fail, then you have no chance of recovery

That is why you keep at least two copies of the data on separate drives - regardless of whether its SSD or not.

crystal9

ok thanks all i will look on amazon see if i am able to find one

crystal9

ok have found this 1 is 500mb ok for mainly photos? Also what else can i store on these?

OneADay

crystal9 wrote: »

ok have found this 1 is 500mb ok for mainly photos? Also what else can i store on these?

Link?

500gig you mean I think - should be able to store anything you like it on it if its just a hard drive. 500gig SSD drive or normal drive? Smaller SSD cost less - so it depends on how much storage you need roughly.

closed

ssd is a very expensive means of backup

you can store many photo's on a 10p 4.7GB dvd

if you are buying a 500GB external drive, you may as well do a full backup of the whole system

crystal9

closed wrote: »

ssd is a very expensive means of backup

you can store many photo's on a 10p 4.7GB dvd

if you are buying a 500GB external drive, you may as well do a full backup of the whole system

thanks, i was wondering if i would have room to do a full back up on this.