5punk

Given the amount of stuff I now appear to have on my PC, and the fact that I want to be able to (physically) move it around, I have need of an external hard drive. However I have no idea if there's anything in particular to be aware of, brands to avoid etc, so thought I'd ask you lot. Looking for best amount of storage available for the £60 mark, so hoping for 1.5-2TB.

Can't really go wrong with WD. USB 2 2TB

I also need more memories but don't really know the best way about doing it. My current hard drive is a puny 930GB (and nearly full), so I'm looking at getting a 2TB external drive. As I'm a tech retard I don't know if I'm doing this the right way round - do I just dump excess files into the external drive, or do I put all my main files into the external one. When I backup my system do I do it onto this?

Roman, do you not have room in your tower for more internal drives?

You would place stuff like films, pron, backups on the external and important gubbins on the internal.

I probably do have space. Should I get a bigger one and transfer all important stuff to that one and keep the old one as a gubbins drive?

One really important thing to remember about external hard drives is that they're going to be quite a bit slower than internal ones pretty much universally.

Speed is highly dependent on the interface you use to hook it to your computer. If you can, use eSATA, as that will be the best. eSATA is nearly as fast as internal SATA. USB 3.0 is also usually close to internal SATA speeds. After that, you get Firewire and USB 2, which are a lot slower. Keep in mind how fast the drive is when you're thinking about what to put on it. Have a lot of MP3s? there should be no problem storing them on any external, as they're small individual files that can be played without issue. If you want to store files that you access a lot, I'd keep those on an internal to minimize the bottleneck. It's not going to be good for running games off of or recording video to.