External HD

locomotiveman

I have a fairly small laptop hard drive and was thinking of getting an external hard drive because there are only about 30 gigs open on the current one. The problem is that I generally take the laptop to class every day, will this effect the relationship between the two machines in any particular way or will the HD be happy to see the laptop and not need to be rebooted or anything odd like that when I get back from class?

Arfenhouse

For the most part, you should be fine. All it is is USB storage, so when you plug it in, it's literally another hard drive. And unless you break the USB cable, the computer should be happy to see its extra stomach when it gets home everyday. My advice: store movies, game files, songs, replaceable stuff like that on the ext. HD, and put your essentials and private info on your computer. That way, if someone takes it from you, its not irreplaceable stuff.

Daedalus

Oh, and you want to be careful when you disconnect the hard drive: use the little icon in the system tray and the "safely remove device" option and all that. If you don't know what I mean, you will once you start using external storage.

Uncle Long

And just like your internal HD, there is no reason to keep it spinning if you're not doing anything with it. There are special ExHDs for video editing and music applications that are designed to be constantly on and constantly spinning, but I doubt that's what you're thinking of. Just take your stuff that you don't immediately need (as suggested) and dump it onto the ExHD and then remove the device and turn it off.

locomotiveman

Sounds great thank you all very much (and anyone else who viewed) this can be locked whenever a mod feels it should be.