Hi, I am currently working, gaming, etc etc on my laptop and am getting fed up with constantly running out of space. I travel 3 or 4 times a year so it has just been easier to keep it all together on one drive. What I would like to do is get everything off the laptop and just leave the OS on the internal drive, but I am not quite sure what drives to get and what would be the best setup. I am thinking along the lines of... Laptop Internal Drive - Operating System only. Drive 1 - All Gaming related files Drive 2 - All work related applications (Dreamweaver, Adobe, etc) Drive 3 - All work files (I am a programmer so have a lot). Drive 4 - Backup drive to make regular copies of drives 1, 2 and 3. My laptop has 3 x USB 2 and a Type II PC Card slot but I am not quite sure how I should go about setting up the above. Any suggestions or recommendations?
If you get an external HDD, I recommend Seagate...you can find some cheap ones and a HDD enclosure at newegg or tigerdirect. The other option is that you might want to get maybe 1 HDD, along with some big USB Flash drives...A 4GB drive might be all you need for your files, which could be seperate from your HDD...as far as games go, not sure what you have or hwo many you need....you could always just buy a new or larger HDD for your laptop and put it in yourself, also available at newegg or TD.
An external USB 2.0 hard drive is probably what you are looking for. You did not say what size you laptop drive was so I can't venture an opinion as to what size external you might need. I will add that I would keep all my main software on the main drive if at all possible. Edit: You may find one large external with partions if you like is better than keeping track of several different ones.
You know..even i personally think that you should get an external USB HDD ..those small compact and portable ones..
Thanks for the replies so far... to answer a couple of questions... The laptop drive is 40gb which has served well for over a year but as I say I run out of space almost daily and have to delete something or other. I don't think Flash drives will be any good in my case as several of my Games exceed 1gb, plus I also download a lot of games from places such as direct2drive.com As for my data, this currently takes up the most space around 20gb of my current drive. Colbyt, you said you would keep all of your software on the main drive, can I ask why? Also, if I were to opt for a USB2.0 drive would the data transfer be fast enough between the laptop and drive in order to play games or run software? After many hours looking at drives here is how I have things planned out now: (40gb) Laptop Internal Drive - Operating System only. (80gb USB2.0) Drive 1 - All Gaming related files (80gb USB2.0) Drive 2 - All work related applications (80gb USB2.0) Drive 3 - All work files (320gb USB2.0) Drive 4 - Backup drive to make regular copies of drives 1, 2 and 3. For the 80gb drives I am leaning towards some Western Digital disks and for the 320 I am torn between a Toshiba and Seagate. Toshiba because it is the laptop manufacturer so should work well together and has a one touch backup button. Seagate, well because they are Seagate basically I wasn't able to find any external HDD enclosures which would carry all 4 drives, unless I am looking in the wrong area.
Mostly because I don't think you are going to get a transfer rate that will make it work well and because all of them only use 50% of your existing drive. The best transfer rate I can find for a USB 2.0 drive is "Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 48 Mbits/s (Max) ". By modern standards that is pretty darn slow for a hard drive. Your internal drive most likely is ata100 maybe a 133. Here is a great place to at least find a good selection to start your search; zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101220-6 Did not want to post a hotlink so you will need to cut and paste. Link should take you direct to external usb hard drive page.