Ok, so my media collection is getting out of control lately and I need a portable hard drive to store it on. I have a budget of around ￡50 and I'm looking for at least 500GB, preferably 1TB. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002E7HEVU/sr=8-1/qid=1302555151/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&qid=1302555151&sr=8-1&seller= is looking like a good choice atm, but I thought I'd get some advice from here first. So BGSF, advise me I guess.

Thanks in advance. :hehe:

When you say "portable", do you just mean an external hard drive, or a bus-powered external hard drive?

External, I'd rather it be able to run off of my laptop but I know that's probably not realistic given what I want for the price.

I have nothing but love for my Western Digital Passport (bought way back when 80 gigs was a lot ), so I'd say your initial choice is a good one.

500GB bus-powered is pretty easy for that price range. A 2.5" bus-powered enclosure and a 2.5" 500GB HDD come to about 50 sterling.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/tsunami-i-data-2500-sata-25-hdd-to-usb-20-black-and-orange-stripe-enclosure
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb-western-digital-wd5000bpvt-scorpio-blue-25-hdd-sata-3gb-s-5400-rpm-8mb-cache-12-ms

Not to sound like a complete technological invalid but that looks like it comes in two parts, would I have to fit the drive to the enclosure and if so, is that a difficult process?

Nope, it's easy. Enclosures that you buy without a drive already in them are made to have drives put in, and taken out. When you buy an "external hard drive", all you're getting is an enclosure with a hard drive already in it, and generally both the enclosure and the drive are of mediocre quality, and the enclosure is sealed, meaning you'd have to break it if you ever need to remove the hard drive.

Oh, that sounds perfect then, thanks :tops:.

Ok, it arrived today, I put it together...plugged it in and it didn't work. My laptop recognises it only on the safely remove hardware icon, it's not showing up anywhere else. How do I fix this?

Might be something really simple like needing to format the hard drive. Hard drives almost never come pre-formatted.

On the start menu, right-click "My Computer" (or just "Computer, or whatever you named your computer).

In the menu, select "Manage"

On the left-side panel click "Disk Management"

Look for a drive that says "Unformatted" and format it to NTFS (Right-click it and select Format)

Otherwise some connection is probably loose/not connected

:bowdown: Thanks man. Doing it right now and it appears to be working. To think I used to call myself computer literate is embarrasing.