I have two external hard drives, both Western Digital. One has its own power source; the other is powered by USB. Both are 1 TB and I have never had a problem. Pooh Bear ==================== This was sent to me thru one of my Yahoo groups: As I have been going through my archived data discs I have been coming across several of them that have become bad over the years and thus I cannot get anything off of them. There are photos and videos that were on some of them that I cannot replace:-( So, I made an account at an online file storage site to save my precious files to the cloud to help save from disc deterioration. As I was looking around to see what my options were for storing my sensitive data I came across this site and found it interesting. The discs are pricey (about ~$3 a disc) but they are known as the '1000 year disc.' It takes a special burner to burn them. The DVD Burner is like $40 at Best Buy so you can probably find it even cheaper somewhere else if you shop around. Not sure if there are any retail sellers for the M-Discs though. I didn't dig too deep trying to find anything. Check out the site because it is interesting. They say it is like burning the data into a rock, lol! Anyway, I found this a while back and thought I would share it with you real quick while I had the time:-) M-DISC, Write Once and Read Forever. You might feel like you're making a "permanent" backup of your files when you copy them onto a DVD or backup to a computer hard-drive, but the truth is these devices suffer from natural decay and degradation. Current DVD technology uses organic dyes and low laser power to make marks on the data layer of a standard recordable DVD. Over time, these marks become unreadable because organic dyes degrade when exposed to minimal levels of light, heat, and humidity. This means all the data you thought was safely stored could be lost because the discs you used have an average lifespan of only about 3 to 5 years! Why would you risk your data based on an average; hundreds of discs taken into account in that average were corrupt and unreadable after only a few months. With Millenniata, we don't subject you to the possibility of losing your data. When we say "Write Once and Read Forever", we mean it. Here is a link that might be useful: http://millenniata.com/m-disc/

I may be wrong, but I think you can only use external drives as main drives if they're SCSI or SATA. If you're dealing with USB devices, they're too slow. Some programs will not install on external drives. I may be misreading Ravencajun's last sentence. If you're looking for an external drive, you want to make sure you get something that is a portable drive. It would probably include all the cables. For a laptop replacement drive, you don't need the cables. What is probably the easiest way to upgrade a laptop hard drive is to get one of these EZupgrade enclosures with a drive. The nice thing about the enclosure is that it will work for either SATA or ATA. It includes software so that you can basically do the image and restore in one step, then just swap drives. Since your laptop is 5 years old and had a 6 gb drive to start, it's probably ATA/IDE/EIDE rather than SATA. You could get something like this with the EZ upgrade for less than $100. You'd put the new drive in the enclosure, run the software to clone the drive, turn everything off, pull the current drive, put in the new one and if all goes well, you can just start right up.

Ms. Rose, do you have a Micro Center in your area? They have a web site but when you go into their stores, unlike a lot of the Best Buy folks, the people who work there are VERY educated in what they sell and the prices are great. My uses are very similar to yours. I've owned a lot of laptops and have paid a lot of money for extra's I never used. My favorite so far has been smaller sized, inexpensive HP's and Compaqs (400.00 or less) with a key pad on the board. They have all the features needed like micro card slots, usb ports, ample ram and hard drive space but are lighter and easier to move around with. After having an 18 inch mammoth HP and hating it, I'll never go larger than 15 inch again. It hasn't happened yet, but I am glad that if after a couple of years something does go wrong with the unit, it won't cost an arm and a leg to replace. Micro Center also has a great warranty program if that's something you are interested in. One thing that people don't usually think about but is really important is to know where the vent fans are for your system. HP used to build them on the bottom causing the units to get very hot. They've now redesigned them to vent on the side, but I'm not sure if all manufactures have done that yet. Also, I know a lot of people are happy with them, but my husband is an IT computer guy and a Dell employee; he's very familiar with their products and feels they are not what they used to be and are over priced for what you get. Here is a link that might be useful: Micro Center

I use Backblaze for our laptops. That is a cloud backup service. Useful for laptops which aren't plugged into an external disk regularly enough to back up that way. Dear Daughter-san's laptop was stolen this summer - car window smashed in and briefcase taken - and Backblaze sent a drive with all her files. The service only backs up data, not system or applications. It can take a long time to complete the first backup to the cloud, because upload speed for home internet service is slow, but Backblaze just works away in the background until it's done. The desktop Mac is backed up with Backblaze, Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive, and Time Machine to another external drive. I don't trust Time Machine. It is convenient but once my Mac's drive failed and Time Machine WOULD NOT RESTORE. The restore process kept failing for some unknown reason in the middle of the night. After the third day of failed restores, SWMBO started asking, not entirely sweetly, if I'd lost all our photos of the kids dear?. I finally studied the log file and realized the process was failing at the same point each time. I estimated what hour of the night that was happening, set my alarm, got up and watched the process fail, and identified the particular file that Time Machine was failing on. I deleted that file from the backup - can't recall how - and then the next restore attempt ran properly. I was appalled that the process could be killed by a single malformed file, and added CCC to the backup regime. Eventually I got tired of carrying external drives to work in case of house fire, and added Backblaze. I must confess I have no saved recipes. I either remember, or improvise, or find a recipe in a book or online, or never make the dish again. SWMBO has some saved recipes in a little box.