External Hard Drives

Is is worth buying an external hard drive for my pc? We have 2 ipods and 1 (soon to be 2 ) mp3 player running from the pc and space is running out fast with all the music and photos I have stored. I only have a 40gb drive at the moment.

We're thinking of doing the same, we've bought our eldest daughter a 60GB IPod for Christmas, another has a MP3 player and youngest daughter already has one of the Sony personal cd players where 1 cd can hold 30 albums, so lots of music being down/up loaded to the computers at the moment, so an external drive would be ideal for us. My computer already has 120GB, but thought I could keep all their music separate from mine!

That is exactly the reason why I am looking at them. Music is taking over the pc's

If you are OK with messing about inside your PC, it is cheaper to fit a second hard drive.

That said, external drives are really useful for moving stuff around.

I recently received an e-mail from Maplin with an offer on a Western Digital 200Gb external USB drive for £99 + delivery charge. (£30 off)

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...6695&doy=2m12D

If that doesn't work, go to:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/ and enter A23CY in the search box.

I have fitted memory and a new cd rewriter so far but never a hard drive

This is the one I was looking at might be the same one.

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx...ationKey=50473

I have 120GB internal drive and two external drives...Freecom one is 160gb but once installed you lose some the capacity and funnily enough I purchased a Western Drive a couple of weeks ago from Amazon(free p/p)thats about 250gb and that worked out cheaper than the other drive and also had £30 off the price bringing it to around £99. The only thing with an external drive is they are often powered by a step down transformer so they are powered up all the time unless you disconnect them. But the extra space is great and allows for one drive crashing or you can put files onto one and keep it safe or take it to another place and transfer items to another pc perhaps.

I was going to keep one spare for emergencies but in the end connected both of them.

Good luck with your decision

Gildy

thanks Gildy

by the looks of things so far the Western Digital seems a good one

Is it easy to install memory yaself? I want to do this, but worried the local shop will charge much more than needed

Never replaced/added memory myself but have seen it done and it was simple. Just a case of pushing them into place on the board. It was done in seconds. Earth yourself though in case static blows something.

If I can do it anyone can. The memory just slots in. That is the reason I tried it myself because of what the shops charged to install it.