yeah so basically i know jack shit about external HD's....

im heading to college next semester though and i won't be able to bring my desktop, and i really wanna export my music (a shitload....prolly like 5 thousand songs) and music, pictures, and some other random files over.

so i'm probably gonna need one with a pretty good sized capacity,.

can anyone explain how they work exactly?

and also any recommendations on which brands i can get for cheap on ebay that are reliable?

Well, external HDD are basically laptops HDD 2.5' ones. They just put in them in a case with an adapter that changes IDE/SATA into a USA 2.0 interface that connects to your computer.

the drive connects to your system as a portable drive but you can use it just like you use your internal HDDs (Hard Disks).

The thing you should remember is the external drives are not cheap, they are actually quite expensive in some cases. You should consider buying 500GB+ if you want to store Multimedia Content.

Western Digital Passport comes in 160,250,360GB sizes i think you should look in WD products and get a 500GB+ one. If your using Windows then format that drive to NTFS or make partitions on it which could have NTFS and FAT32 both.


Try to get your External HDD from a dealer with warranty.