I thought I’d just quickly buy an external drive to attach to the laptop (now desktop as it never moves) to expand it’s storage. It will be a working drive, not a backup but mostly just full of photos and the odd video.

And there’s too much choice!

Can the good people of STW point me towards a reasonably quick, reliable USB 3.0 drive, 2TB plus for under £100 please?

Cheers!

Loads and loads.. We have a three of the small 2.5″ ones for laptops/movies for TV, then a 5 1/4 networked drive. Various sizes. All been running for a fair few years.

Seagate 6 TB Backup Plus Hub USB 3.0 Desktop 3.5 Inch External Hard Drive for PC and Mac with 2 Months Free Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01IAD5ZEE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Vue6CbRMM6M6Z

That one alright? It’s 6gb which should last a while.

(I’ll have to get a bigger NAS for back ups too at some point 🙄)

I’m using a WD Elements drive, works fine, seems pretty quick. Cost £80 for 4TB.

Some of the Seagate Backup Plus (and possibly others) enclosures have Seagate Archive drives inside, which use shingled (SMR) technology. You wouldn’t want to use one of those as an everyday work drive because writes are very slow once you fill the on-drive cache. Should be ok for a video archive but not for video editing.

Cheers. I’ve gone down a different route and ordered a caddy that replaces the optical drive on the laptop and a 1tb Crucial SSD.

No speed issues and when the laptop finally dies an SSD will be more useful in any future machine 🙂

Sorted. New drive in place of CD drive and up and running 🙂