USB Flash Drive or External Hard Drive?

[nikkiy21]

I need extra storage space as my laptop has nearly run out of space on the back-up recovery drive.

I have masses of digitial photos on my laptop (all saved as highest quality) so the files are big. As I want to keep them all and keep adding to them, I need somewhere to store them all. Would it best to get a USB flash drive or an external hard drive for this purpose?

I won't need to carry anything around, I purely need something for storage.

Thanks for any help.

 

[AlbertLionheart]

External hard drives are more reliable and generally have greater capacity than flash drives. If portability is not an issue, external drives are the best bet.

 

[SNGX1275]

I'd buy an external enclosure for desktop SATA or IDE drives. Usually you'll want to pick IDE or SATA as enclosures that do both are expensive. But that way you can put a 'cheap' desktop drive in there and get massive amounts of storage for less money than going with a 2.5" external. Another added benefit of going that route is if you ever have any problems with the drive you can just stick it in a desktop computer, with flash you are out of luck and with the 2.5" you'd need a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter.

Plus with a flash drive you are going to get a max of about 8 gigs right now I think, give or take a few. With an external you have a max of about 1-2TB.

You'll save some money by buying an enclosure and the drive seperately.

Originally when I bought mine I threw an old 4 gig drive in there. So I got more storage than I did with my 1GB flash stick, and still put an old drive to use. Currently I have a 500GB drive in there and have retired the 4 gig.

 

[Daveskater]

i'd buy an external caddy/enclosure for a normal ide drive as well, if you're in the uk then you can get one from ebuyer.com for about £10 and a fair sized hard drive will set you back around £30 (i got a western digital 160GB one for £33 from ebay a few months ago)

like SNGX1275 said, it's the best way to go for a few reasons

p.s. i also put my old 60gb drive into an enclosure from ebuyer because i wanted to keep the drive and have some extra storage if needed

 

[poertner_1274]

The other nice thing about an external 3.5" drive enclosure is that you can retrieve data off of any HDD, even if Windows won't boot up properly. You can swap HDD into the enclosure and retrieve the data (given the drive isn't totally fried).