Need a external hard drive for my laptop. Suggestions?

[NinjaPoodle]

Originally Posted by Jen

There are TWO kinds of external drives - external and portable. Most companies like Western Digital and Seagate make both kinds.

The external kind are true back up hard drives - archives. You transfer files to it like you would those little pen drives and it stays there forever unless you delete it. FreeAgent Go is the portable drive, while the archive ones are called FreeAgent Desktop or FreeAgent Pro.

Western Digital makes archive ones called MyBook and portable ones called Passports.

The portable ones sync with your hard drive upon first use and then whenever you plug it in and want to save more things to it, it syncs your hard drive again, basically capturing the current state of the hard drive, so you can take it with you and use it on other computers, then bring it back and whatever you worked on while at the other computer will be synced back to your hard drive. This means that say you sync it the first time, then delete all your music off your laptop/desktop, thinking that it's all saved on the Passport - it IS, only when you go to sync it again, if you don't transfer those files back to your hard drive, it'll sync what's on your computer to the portable drive - meaning it will delete any files on the portable drive that you deleted on your hard drive. I could have sent the files back to my PC, then synced it all again, but I didn't realized.

Hopefully I made sense there, it sounded complicated lol.

That made a lot of sense. Thanks Jen

btw, whats the largest size a laptop could handle?