Looking for help regarding external hard drives...

[RaceBoarder]

I'm running out of memory on my laptop PC... I've got less than 5% of the memory left... This came up as a discussion point during Thanksgiving dinner at my parents house... I mentioned that I was going to start looking for an external hard drive... Well, my mom came across a deal on a Toshiba Canvio Basics 3.0 1TB drive during her Black Friday adventures and picked it up for me...

Now I've never delt with external storage on this scale before... Is it any different than using a 2-4 gig Flash Drive? Also, the drive I have is a portable hard drive... The screen on my laptop is shot so I have to use a monitor with the laptop... Because of that, the puter just sits here like a desktop... Can I leave the new hard drive connected 24/7 without any repercussion? Is there any difference between a portable drive and the desktop drives?

Any tips for moving data onto the new drive? Mostly going to be pictures and music going onto the drive... Just a computer n00b here and trying to figure this deal out...

 

[St. Clown]

Re: Looking for help regarding external hard drives...

You're running out of storage, not memory. Memory is generally your RAM, unless you're doing something(s) that eat up all of your RAM and then there's a portion of your HDD (hard drive disk) that's used as temporary memory - that's when your computer gets really slow. Normally that's 10% of your HDD, so now that you're down to 5% of your HDD with available space, you're actually running the risk of creating OS crashes, though that's not frequent.

An external HDD is just like an internal HDD with the exception of the bus used to move data, and for that reason the external drive will appear to operate very slowly in comparison to your internal drive. With regards to the difference with a flash drive, well, the flash drive is a solid state drive while the HDD is not, and the HDD is 250500 times the size of your flash drive, so it can take longer to access the information.

In theory, you can run your external HDD, but it's just wasting energy. Generally, people only use the external drives for data recovery, so transfer all of your photos and music there for storage, and then cleanup your internal drive so that you have 15-20% of space available, so as to avoid bumping into that 10% memory overflow reserve. Others might have a differing opinion on that, however.

 

[unofan]

Re: Looking for help regarding external hard drives...

Now I've never delt with external storage on this scale before... Is it any different than using a 2-4 gig Flash Drive?

Bigger but slower. Will use more power.

Also, the drive I have is a portable hard drive... The screen on my laptop is shot so I have to use a monitor with the laptop... Because of that, the puter just sits here like a desktop... Can I leave the new hard drive connected 24/7 without any repercussion? Is there any difference between a portable drive and the desktop drives?

Not really, other than typically connecting through one or two USB ports rather than internal SATA or IDE cables. You can leave it connected continuously but it will draw more power and use the USB ports. Otherwise, they're the same.

Any tips for moving data onto the new drive? Mostly going to be pictures and music going onto the drive... Just a computer n00b here and trying to figure this deal out...

Just pick a time where you can let things run as long as needed, even if it's while you're in the other room watching football.