I need to buy an external hard drive to store photos. I currently have a laptop with 27.9 GB of storage.?
91% of that free space is now used mostly to store those photos. I've tried using CDs...I need too many and I just lost the info from one...don't know if it was my error or a defect that showed up in the CD.
Bottom line...I need to free up space on the laptop so it operates faster. Can anyone suggest what to look for in an externla hard drive? How much to pay? What "brands" might be better than others.
Thanks.
dcs9972007-09-01T09:13:47Z
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Here you go. I would look into a drive like this one. I did not see anyone address the issue of power. With a regular usb hard drive you will have to have a power supply to use it.And you will have to lug it around with you and your laptop and camera. This one is powered from the computer so you can use it anywhere.
As for cleanup I would run a program called Ccleaner. It will clear up alot of windows bloat that has happened on your system. The first time I used it it cleaned 5 GB of junk out of the hard drive. I did not loose anything that I needed or wanted. (It will not delete ant photos or programs) And it is free.
Western Digital is dominating the high-capacity market (Terabyte drives) and for good reason - they're cheap, at 37 cents per gigabyte. Check the cost per gigabyte when you make your purchase. to compare, new Blu-Ray rewritable disks are $1.00 per gigabyte (before you purchase a Blu-Ray drive).
For laptops/portableness though I wouldnt go so large - those things are bulky as hell.
Make sure the HDD you do get is small, light and doesnt require AC power - most do. Others will give the option of using battery power or direct USB power (the latter being slow).
I also recommend looking out for the little redundancies, for example, a removable USB cable - if you buy a thumbdrive and you snap the usb plug on it - you are screwed. And I've been there so its possible.
Really though for that size a hard drive (30gb) it would be just as worthwhile to burn onto a dual layer DVD (8 something gigabytes per disc).
I just did a Google search for "online storage services" and actually got some results. The cheapest was mozy.com, giving unlimited storage for 5 bucks a month-they mianly provide a backup service and might only have tons of capacity, but not the ability to handle a lot of traffic. If it's pics that you want to access often and freely try a file sharing service like rapidshare, which is better suited to frequent access-it costs twice as much if you pay month to month, but paying for a year gives you about the same cost.
Unlike a new HDD, those services provide unlimited storage and rapidshare is intended for file sharing, so if you want to give the pictures to someone you just have to give them a download link (it's the only way anyone can get the link since they have no browsing/surfing).
Hello; If you don't want to buy a new laptop with larger hard drive, and better performance, and a kick butt dvd player/recorder, then mabey you'd be happy just installing a larger hard drive, and installing a DVD player/recorder... a dvd can store about 4.8 Gb of data, that's a lot of photos! A larger hard drive will help too, but temporarily... you also may want to simply consider a portable (2.5" or less) external USB 2.0 portable hard drives; I've seen 250gb drives for less than a $100! small enough to fit in your pocket, and also enough room to backup your notebook, should you have a disk failure! I'm going that route myself!
Anything will do as long as it's not 2ND hand - cause you will not trust it. Most drives these days are cheap - think a 300G is only $100. and the external enclosure $70. You can even put it together yourself. Just format it and away you go! ND: DVDs store 4.7G, so there is an option too. Even 4Gig Flash drives are only about $80.
What format are the images stored in cause some can be compressed (Exclude jpg unless want to loose some quality)