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    How do you format your external hard drive?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by gosman, May 20, 2006.

  1. gosman

    gosman Notebook Consultant

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    Just got a great deal on my Seagate exteral hard drive 400 gb 16mb cache! Only $200 at Best Buy after a price match from Frys!!

    Anyway, this thread is for formating info. I have a e1505 Dell laptop at 100gb. So should I partition the hard drive so I can back up automatically on the laptop and save the other 300gb for movies, games, and other applications. Problem is if I do this, I have to reformat the drive- it is new so I don't lose anything- but it is hard to push the button. Do I really need to partition?. Just same my documents occasionally is good enough?

    What do others do for their external hard drive management?
     
    gosman, May 20, 2006
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  2. tianx

    tianx Notebook Geek

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    Depends really on what you plan to do with the space...

    If I had an external HDD.. I'd partition it this way.

    40GB - Documents and Pictures, etc etc... (A Little more if you're a camera nut)
    100GB - MP3s and Whatnot
    200GB - Movies / TV Shows
    60GB - Misc data backups
     
    tianx, May 20, 2006
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  3. qwester

    qwester Notebook Virtuoso

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    I leave my externals in one piece, and just use efficient filing. I already have 4 HDDs to deal with (3 external) so there is already too many drives under my computer.

    Just make sure you defragment once in a while. The larger the partitions the higher the potential of fragmentation.
     
    qwester, May 20, 2006
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  4. gosman

    gosman Notebook Consultant

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    So Qwester, what do you do about one touch backup of your laptop or desktop? Are do you just copy my documents only?
     
    gosman, May 20, 2006
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  5. qwester

    qwester Notebook Virtuoso

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    I don't use backup software, I store and archive my data on the external HDDs directly. I don't store files on my laptop, just the things I am working with at the time. Not enough space, I have 2 OSes installed :)
     
    qwester, May 20, 2006
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  6. Sykotic

    Sykotic Notebook Evangelist

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    There are plenty of backup software out there. Acronis is what I use, I place the image on a NAS on a network. GL
     
    Sykotic, May 22, 2006
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