Two hard drives ?

[dunc85]

With External USB drives, you also need to ensure your BIOS supports booting from USB, otherwise you'll only be able to use the disk for backing up data. You won't be able to boot from it.

[MickJ]

Many external drives come with a backup prog that you can set up to scan selected directories on you main 'C' drive. It will then automatically copy any files that have changed. This happens as soon as you close a file on the main drive, so you always have an up-to-date backup.

 

At least that is true of the Iomega drive I have.

 

Saves a lot of hassle remembering to backup those vital files, never tried making it bootable though so cannot comment on that.

[Ken L]

Personally, I use both options.

I have a 160GB internal HDD piggybacked onto my machines 40GB disc.

There are some minor power supply niggles but it lets me organise my music, photos, video etc easily.

I then use an 80GB external HDD as backup. This is usually stored at my parents house and retrieved/updated every month or so.

Using both options gives me lots of flexibility but more importantly, in the event of fire, flood or spontanious meltdown of my PC, 99% of my data will be safe - important when that data is family photos and a music collection that has taken me ages to convert to WMA format.

 

With external drives now costing 50p a Gig, there's no reason not to use two external drives if you don't want to mess about with installing the internal IDE jobbie - It can be tricky and I had to get help from a mate because I couldn't get my machine to recognise the new drive. One to use and one for safekeeping.