Tech Help...

[j3]

Since I'm borderline retarded when it comes to computer crap, I figured I'd ask people who know far more than I do the following question:

I'm interested in buying an external hard drive. After looking around at my choices, I'm even more clueless than I was before. Any suggestions?

C'mon people...help a moron out.

Comments

[kizayaen]

What're you planning to use it for

[j3]

Basically I just want to dump all of the movies/music/ebooks that are currently clogging up my hard drive onto something else to free up some major space. All of your info is definitely a big help in assisting me in narrowing down my search. Thanks!

[kizayaen]

Okay then. Movies are big, so yeah, an external will probably be a better bet for you than a flash drive, then.

One other thing you might see advertised is the size of the disk cache - usually 8mb these days; you might see some go up to 16mb or some older ones with 2mb. More is better, but the performance gain will be pretty miniscule and I doubt you'd notice it much even if you had two otherwise-identical units side by side.

You'll also see seek times - that's the average time it takes for the hard drive to find and begin reading from or writing to a specific spot on the physical disk surface. This probably isn't really going to be all that important to you. It's mostly for people way up higher on the price/performance curve who're willing to spend extra bucks to make Windows boot three seconds faster, or cut load times for on-disk databases by a crucial 0.2 seconds.

[j3]

Based on all of the info you gave me, I'll be shopping around this weekend. Thanks again for all your help. It'll make things a hell of a lot easier.