Best size for external hard drives

Need more space for backups.

Been looking at External hard drives.
The largest hard drive i have is a 1TB but been looking on auctions sites etc and see there are now upto 4tb hard drives - not seen anything bigger. Seems the larger you look at the cheaper they are BUT what is best ?

Would you guys suggest getting one as large as that or maybe getting say 2 x 2tb hard drives.
I dont want something that is big and chunky!
plus a 500gb HD ive just bought is portable ( needed no electrical socket ) just USB

What is the quality like of the larger hard drives. I want to store photos and well as back up games/films etc onto these hard drives.
So another thing as i need them to have different formats can a large hard drive be split into different formats, or will i need 1 for each format i need.

Not sure what the best one is, but if you stick to a well know brand name such as Samsung, Western Digital or Seagate, you'll be fine, get the biggest one you want to get, as for the different formats, I'm assuming you mean having FAT32 and NTFS on one hard drive, you will just have to partion the drive and you can run both formats on the same drive.

thanks! yes most of my HD are seagate yes thats exactly what i mean need FAT32 and WBFS so as long as its a well known brand you'd say go ahead with a 2-4 tb

Originally Posted by Linny40

thanks! yes most of my HD are seagate yes thats exactly what i mean need FAT32 and WBFS so as long as its a well known brand you'd say go ahead with a 2-4 tb

Can't see why not Linny, I'm not much for buying off makes brands of things, remember you get what you pay for

Linny you can have all the wbfs transfered to ntfs with wii backup manager and use wiiflow as your loader

Originally Posted by sinno

Linny you can have all the wbfs transfered to ntfs with wii backup manager and use wiiflow as your loader

dont confuse me ! not dabbled with Wii for about a yr ...........cant you tell its christmas ! But got so much now on my pc that i need to store it all externally. I do have other external drives but like to keep a copy of stuff on the pc or a hd connected to the pc as back up so if i want to look at what ive got i dont have to keep unplugging HD's from to and plug into pc to check.
My hard drives are different formats depending on what they are being used on. Films watched on consoles need to be fat32 but bluray is ntfs( i think) etc so if all films/games are backed up to the pc/hd i can just transfer to which ever drive its needed on.

God hope that lot makes sense - because i know what i mean


aaaaarrgg!!! just had to delete some as when trying to download got a message Aborted not enough room on disk ( or something like that) looks like a shopping trip 2mora

Me complicated.................. never!

if you find something you like look at peoples reviews and hopefully that should go someway in helping you decide what you want to buy.

Linny, I find that most of the cr@p that I store on the external Drives is just that - cr@p. what you need to do is go through the drive and be ruthless, for instance if you have a movie that you watched 12 months ago and haven't even thought about watching it again - Delete it, if you watched a movie that wasn't great - delete it, if you burned a copy to disk and you still have the disk - delete it. photos - fair enough, they are all important in their own way, but make sure that you haven't got 2 or 3 copies of any folders.
I don't have any that are bigger than 500GB portable drives, I just delete crappy games and movies and music, etc at least once a year.

One of the most important questions is, "How much data are you prepared to lose if a drive crashes?"

I am a self confessed hoarder of TV series and documentaries, I've been collecting them for years & it's almost become a compulsion

Because of the time spent downloading them, the bandwidth used (that's massive) & the time spent organizing and renaming them to some sort of understandable format, they have become kind of precious to me, so hopefully they will be left for others to enjoy\laugh at long after I'm gone. Some of my collection might never be available to download in future should I lose it. For that reason I use only 1TB drives. You can call it eccentric if you like? but I Sync each individual drive with a second drive ensuring that if one should (and they are prone to) go belly up I have a duplicate. Should one of them ever die I can purchase another and immediately Sync with the backup drive so as I always have a better chance of recovery. To take the paranoia one step further, the backup drives are held in a different location to the master drives. It has kind of become a hobby with me I guess and it's so much easier to stream stuff instead of having box sets of thousands of DVD disc's

I guess it's down to how important your data is to you?

Have you ever looked online at the charges the professionals are looking for to retrieve data?

Outside of Solid state drives all drives have moving parts and or exceptionally prone to shock and failure, therefore I would not trust important data to larger drives such as 3 or 4 TB. 1TB drives are much easier handle and are also faster when it comes to duplicating them.

Originally Posted by Gman496

For that reason I use only 1TB drives

Gman pretty well summed up my sentiments exactly with everything that he wrote. And for all those reasons, I will probably not go larger than 1 TB myself for the foreseeable future.