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Originally Posted by Jetstream
But the problem therein lies that I have heard that external HD can be quite expensive and of high-maintenance. After talking to some friends of mine, one offered the suggestion to just buy an internal hard-drive for the reason that they can be significantly cheaper and easier to maintain than their external counterparts.
My question is this: If it will benefit me economically, should I buy an internal HD for my laptop? Granted it must be of a higher memory capacity, I was thinking around 180~200gb, but I fear it will be difficult to install.
And what about the installed programs on my pc? How will I go about transferring those?
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I've been using an external drive for a year now, and I'd definitely say it is not high maintenance. In fact, it is very handy at LAN parties, taking gobs of documents to work, file recovery, backups, and so many things.
The answer to your question is this: Yes. However, it won't benefit you economically.
For a laptop, an external PATA drive would be cheaper than an internal drive of any type. The 2.5in laptop drives are generally more expensive, run at a slower RPM, and have much less space than an equivalent 3.5in desktop drive.
All you've got to do is grab a PATA drive ~250GB (not expensive) and a decent enclosure to pop it in. I bet you could do all that for around $100
I even did a little research:
Here's a generic 2.5in laptop drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148184
Not too shabby, better than I expected.
Now, here's an average 3.5in external drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148141
You get more GBs for damn near half the price.
Now all you've got to do is pick your enclosure (I sorted by rating, not price)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...d&Order=RATING
You can get one from between $20 and $40 I'd say.
Now, with all that said, leave your operating system on the internal 60GB drive, but start transferring documents over to the external drive. Basically, all the core components stay on the internal drive, and all your fun stuff (pictures/music/word documents/whatever) gets moved over to the new drive.