External Hard drive.

My computers are ancient, one on XP, tother a laptop on Vista.

They run ok but are getting full of photos, so i was thinking its time to store them elsewhere to free up and hopefully speed up said machines.

Is it worth getting an external Hard Drive or just using USB storage whats the benefits or drawbacks of each. ?

Advice welcome.

Re: External Hard drive.

I keep nothing on my PC everything on external hard drives or USB storage

I use ATMT hard drive for music a Siemens for movies a seagate for more music

By doing this it never blocks up the hard drive in the PC

Re: External Hard drive.

Get extra hard drive

Re: External Hard drive.

For example:

A 64 GB USB flash drive can hold millions of documents, thousands of hours of music, or up to 25,000 photos.

A 1 TB external drive can hold millions of documents, 16,660 hours of music, up to 320,000 photos and 1,000 hours of video content

Re: External Hard drive.

Yep a simple USB hard drive is the way to go. That way you can transfer your photos and photos between any future computers you have and those of your friends. It's a simple plug and play solution.

Re: External Hard drive.

I agree with the above.

External hard drives are relatively cheap these days. If your photos are valuable to you, I'd get two and keep them separately.

If one fails, or is burgled, you've had it.

Re: External Hard drive.

I like the idea of storing items separately, like photos on one, videos on another.

Re: External Hard drive.

If you have two external HDDs, each of a reasonably large size, I'd store your photo and your videos on each drive.

Belt and braces! (No, I'm sure you don't wear braces!)

Re: External Hard drive.

Windows developed a small program called SyncToy 2.1 to backup files from one location/drive to another.

External HD's are extremely cheap and I use two to back up my photos and third for my video and a switched internal drive for Windows imaging my Win7. I wouldn't use a USB stick because I would probably lose them, have limited capacity and found them to be less reliable than a HD.

Re: External Hard drive.

I have 6 external hard drives. Heavy things with enclosures and power supplies, also lots of wires and dust.
I also have memory sticks. That's it just the sticks, that plug into the USB socket. I keep them in a container that I made and each one is labelled so I know what is on them.