Sunday, March 1, 2009

Should I get an external hard drive?

My hard disk is nearly full.

Not all members may have heard this question at the last meeting on external hard drives and the very brief discussion it produced . Here it is as if posted directly to the Blog with the answering comment.
Computer related questions of any type are welcome.

2 comments:

Denis said...

External hard drives are a cost effective storage for photographs and backups, 500Gigabyte costing under $200 and 1000GB (1 Terabyte) not very much more. Like a Memory stick they plug into a USB port and behave just like any other drive or folder. Most have a built in backup program.
Terabyte and sub-terabyte hard drives are available from all major hard drive companies, including Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital. Seagate and Western Digital usually top a HD list but due to their emphasis on reducing noise and power usage they are slower than several other external drives.

These links may be of help in choosing one.
http://tinyurl.com/dc48ym
http://tinyurl.com/dedxe6

Marcel said...

I like the ones with a separate power supply, not just the lugs in the wall or computer. If you have a powersupply that fluctuates it does not do the powersupply for the harddive to much good, ask Marty.
I like the Western digital and Samsung ones. Speed is good but not critical, reliability is.