as the title implies, im looking to get a new external hard drive and am turning to clutchfans for some assistance. im looking in the $100 range, give or take. my main uses will be to back up work files, 95% of which are excel. but i would also like to be able to store and access digital photos, music and video too. im a musician and do alot of recording so i would like to be able to take wave files off my pc and bring them over to a friends studio and drag and drop them into their pc. ive also started getting some work doing scoring for movies and short video/animations - some of the video files i get are a few gigs (i have an hour long one that is 13!) and i would like to be able to store them on an external hard drive. ideally, i could delete them off my pc and just be able to access and watch them directly off the external hard drive. same w/ photos and music - i would like to be able to view/listen directly off the external, rather than my pc. i was looking at the hp simplesave (500G). it looks good, but the impression i have is that its more of a 'back-up' type thing rather than a 'true' external hard drive. you just leave it plugged in and it automatically updates your files. i dont necessarily want that - id like to be able to pick and choose which files i save on there and be able to easily access them. and i dont know if i could directly watch video/view photos/listen to music off of it. any help would be appreciated.
I have a WD Passport 500GB hard drive that I've been very satisfied with. I bought it about a year ago, and I've loaded it up with about 100GB of digitized music (CDs I've backed-up and recorded wav files of jangly 12-string guitar playing :grin: ), and all my photos, work files and other stuff. It's a little bigger than an Iphone, so that's nice and transferring files is very quick. You can get one for about $80, or you could double up and get a 1TB one for around $120 or so. I'm sure other people will have other recommendations, but it definitely been a solid buy for me.
I've had 2 Western Digital Hard drives which I always backed up to my PC and both failed on me. I'm not saying WD will always fail, but mine did, so I will not buy theirs again. Ever since, I've bought Seagate and Buffalo and they have not failed. I bought a 1TB Seagate external at Fry's for $89 last week because I was running out of space on my Buffalo 750Gb because of photos and videos (I shoot photos in RAW and video in ADHC). Do what Xenochimera says. I've never tried that. I've always gone straight for the external drive. I believe that most hard drives will give you a choice to install their software for that automatic backup feature or just leave it alone like a regular ol' external expansion.
Is there some online storage service that can do the same thing? Sorry to derail -- but we're looking for a more convenient way to backup photos and the such without losing quality.
