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Storage forum: Need advice on External Hard Drives

by: DEW417 April 26, 2012 7:57 AM PDT

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Need advice on External Hard Drives

by DEW417 - 4/26/12 7:57 AM

Our computer is several years old, and with the years of adding photos, music, and downloaded games, our hard drive is close to being full. Is an external hard drive the answer? We don't want to just back-up (although that's a definate bonus), we need to expand our ability to save more information outside of the internal hard drive. For instance, we let my son download a game from the internet and the files were so huge it filled up the last few gigs of hard drive space we had left. We made him uninstall it. Could the game files be saved to the external hard drive instead to allow him to have and play the game?

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Re: external hard disk.

by Kees_B Moderator - 4/26/12 8:01 AM

In Reply to: Need advice on External Hard Drives by DEW417

Technically you can store data on an external hard disk. But prudence dictates that you need a second external as backup device. There are FAR too many posts in this forum of failed externals to use them as even a moderately safe place to store files.

An external disk, moreover, is much slower than in internal one. So running programs off such a disk (and those huge game files are in the same folder as the executables) definitely is a bad idea.

The best thing to do:
1. Buy and install a second internal disk. All desktops can accomodate it.
2. Buy an external disk for backup purposes.
Do BOTH!

Kees


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