And the answer to the question is: An External Hard Drive!
Why?:
- To stop you from filling up your hard drive with photos and your iTunes library. Your hard drive must have unused space in order to run the operating system efficiently. Filling up your external hard drive does not cause your computer to hang, slow down, crash or not boot.
- Backup your hard drive. Hard drives fail and laptops get stolen. If you have backups of key files on your external hard drive, the pain of getting your new computer back to where you were will be minimized.
- Save some money on your next computer by buying the one with the smaller hard drive. 2TB (yes, terabyte!) external hard drives exist. Why spend money for a big hard drive for your operating system when you can put all your stuff on a huge external hard drive.
- One external hard drive will work on all your other computers. No more trying to remember what computer that document is located on. One thing to remember is that the external hard drive will be formatted to work with the various Windows Operating Systems or the Apple Mac OS System. A Windows drive will not read Mac OS files, but a Mac OS drive will read Windows files.
Buying an External Hard Drive
- There are basically two types of hard drives; a) small physical size (pack of cigarettes sized) using the power from just one or two USB ports on your computer b) large physical size (thick paper back) using an electrical adapter like the one for your notebook that plugs into the wall. If you are lugging the external drive around, the USB port powered external drive makes sense. This convenience will cost you more than the paper book sized drive.
- The other difference is whether backup software is included in the price of the drive. Do you want a program to automatically backup folders you selected or are you comfortable cutting and pasting, drag and dropping from one hard drive directory to another? External hard drives with a backup program cost more.
