External Hard Drives

[Girgy85]

I'm looking to buy an External Hard Drive to back up all my files on my Laptop. Any recommendations?

I'm looking at a 500gb seagate for £49.99 but in the reviews they say you only 467gb to use, why is this?

Also is over 400gb enough storage space for music, files and photos?

Ive clicked on the properties of my documents in my computer and it says size on disk is 29.5 GB  does this sound about right?

[AndrewT]

Ive clicked on the properties of my documents in my computer and it says size on disk is 29.5 GB  does this sound about right?

Where's the rest of your porn?

[Girgy85]

Ive clicked on the properties of my documents in my computer and it says size on disk is 29.5 GB  does this sound about right?

Where's the rest of your porn?

I dont save porn on the lappy LDO!

Ive found a Seagate 1TB one at Argos for £69.99 so ive reserved that. Im guessing 1TB is more than enough for storing.

[Hairydude]

Might be a wee bit of a stretch but the media drives are pretty good; in that you can just leave it linked up to your TV(and rigged through entertainment system) so that you can just play all your movies and music through this without having to play it through your PC

Just seen on ebay you can get a 1TB one for about £90- 500gb would be even cheaper

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sumvision-Cyclone-1000GB-1TB-Media-Player-Hard-Drive-/310185990387?cmd=ViewItem&pt=UK_Computing_HardDrives_RL&hash=item48388698f3

[Girgy85]

Just checked the properties on my C: drive and says ive only got 3gb of free space left. Should i do a disk cleanup?

[Bongo]

Sometimes HDD manufacturers use 1000MB as a GB instead of the actual 1024MB, which leads to a 'loss' of storage capacity.

You also lose some space to the file system (i.e. information about each file and where it is on the disk).

Basically every disk you buy will be like that and it doesn't matter too much.

How big you want it depends on what you're planning to store. Probably best not to buy too big as prices will generally fall over time.

I wouldn't bother trying to clean up your other disk, you'll probably just break something.