I need to buy an external hard drive to store photos. I currently have a laptop with 27.9 GB of storage.?

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.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...

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.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

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)

You can get 1/2 Tarrabyte Drives for about $109 at frys right now (External Drives) that work great.

You can also get smaller drives that will run of USB power only, for a bit more, and a size of around 80-120Gig

You can also get a new internal drive to replace your current drive, and give you more internal storage. Though this method will require re-instilation of your OS & software.

Yeah it is an incredible theory, exterior HDDs contain there own skill furnish and that they simply connect the two by way of USB or Firewire by ability of USB into the USB of your laptop, , they could consistently be working alongside your laptop. the best attainable drives you should get could be, a Seagate FreeAgent(NTFS format) or a Western digital My e book(fat 32 format). I own the two certainly one of those drives and picture of them as super. the only reason you may get packing up is not any rely if it is a fat stress the place all the documents is fragmented, and all you should do is to defragment, by going into initiate then All courses, then upload-ons, then gadget kit, then Disk Defragment. as long by using fact the HDD has minimum15% loose disk area it is going to enable for defragmentation. subsequently you should get a NTFS exterior HDD for the reason that there will be alot of examining and writing of your track in case you would be getting access to it from the stress and listening to it or puting it on a track participant, and all this examining, copying and writing will reason extra fragmented data to ensue so a fat stress does no longer be properly perfect. Anymore questions, touch me. Have a extreme high quality day, and reliable searching. Ken

I bought an external HDD box(Lazer) and put my own HDD in(40G).The boxes are fairly cheap and Im not sure which brand would be better for just the box.

The HDD is secondhand and was free but would be cheap if buying (40gig).

But for only <30 gig why not burn onto a few DVDs?(maybe 6-8 at 4.5(7) per standard DVD.This would only cost a few dollars.

Go to newegg, and read the customer comments and reviews. You'll be able to get a good idea of which hard drives are good and which aren't.