Jodie and I are looking into getting an external drive for our home network — something we can put images and music on, that sort of thing, and free up hard drive space on our computers. Here are some recommendations and advice:
Link: Portable Hard Drive Recs | Ask Metafilter.
"I would like to get a 250GB portable hard drive to dump my RAW and PSD files and my music files into so as to free up space on my main computer hard drive"
I just bought an external HD (maxtor), and I also bought a portable pocket size one (iomega). I read all the reviews, agonized forever, and basically just picked ones that were decently rated on newegg and not too expensive. My main recommendation is to get two so that you have redundancy in your backups. That way, if your laptop gets stolen and one external goes down, you still have another external with your stuff on it.
Newegg is a good idea, I hadn’t looked over there yet. Two is a good idea as well – no redundancy like redundant redundancy, after all
What size drives did you get?
The maxtor is 200 gigs and the iomega is just 120. My laptop itself just has an 80 gig harddrive. Truth be told, the maxtor was from a friend, so I didn’t pick that HD size. For the iomega, my choice was mostly based on cost. I wanted something bigger than my HD and under $100, so it worked well for my needs.