About Gary Housknecht Expertise I should be able to answer a lot of questions about various drives including Zip drives, both internal or external. I have not used Jazz drives.
Experience I AM NOT LISTED IN THIS CATEGORY ANY LONGER.
Question I called a techie to ask him to buy/install an ext. HD. I want to be able to click once to back up my files, and to have the ability to take the ext. with me if I have to suddenly go overseas to tend to a sick relative.
How should I be directing him on which one to buy? While he's a techie, I don't want to leave the entire decision up to him.
Thx!
Joan
Answer An external hard drive is a good choice these days for back up storage. These are not in the category of removable drives like low capacity Jazz or Zip drives. Hard Drives are relatively low cost with very high capacities for storage. One of the best brands is Maxtor but in reality it is hard to go wrong by just finding the best price for the capacity you want. Your techie will know the major brand names like Maxtor so use his judgement on that. Since there is not a huge difference in price, I would recommend at least 80 gigabytes but 100 to 150 GB drives can be found at fairly affordable prices. Most use USB2 for connecting to your PC, which is recommended.
Keep in mind that data storage such as text files, MS Word documents, MS Excel workbooks and so forth take up relatively little space and 80 GB just for those type files (even a few thousand of them) is way too much sapce and you could settle for a less expensive 40GB drive, for example. However, if you will be storing graphic and other multimedia files like .wav music or .avi and other large video files or large .jpg files and such, you will need at least the 80GB.
I hope this answers your question but if you have anything further, just ask.
