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General discussion

help choosing portable storage

Nov 15, 2006 11:47PM PST

hi
i'm looking for some advise on what to buy my husband for christmas.
he wants an external hard drive to back up his itunes. we have a inspiron 6400 with 80g memory. he is filling up the hard drive with his music. i want to buy him some type of memory storage. i am looking at around 80-100g. can anyone help me choose the right one. i would like something simple to work with, something that will plug in and his music will come up and then he can update his ipod etc.
i was looking at the 250 GB 7200 RPM Silver Series from iomega at dell is this any good for what we need. i am looking to spend around $150.
thanks for any help.

Discussion is locked

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For what you want. . .
Nov 16, 2006 9:52AM PST

an internal HD will be better. iTunes can get confused if the drive holding the music is external. If for some reason the iPod is plugged in before the external drive is plugged in, you'll get an error. For general music storage to relieve a crowded drive, an internal will be better.

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Does he like doodling with PC stuff... ?
Nov 16, 2006 11:42AM PST

How does he backup the current system ?

Does the current system have a DVD burner ?

He can put together his own own external.....pick a hard drive of choice .. capacity, price, etc., one with a 3 or 5 year warranty (vice 1 year warranty) and an enclosure of choice 1 year (warranty pretty much across the board)...you can have the pick of litter.
You can also put a dual layer DVD burner into an external too.

VAPCMD

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music back up
Nov 16, 2006 10:53PM PST

he currently backs it up with data cd's. we have a dvd burner in our laptop right now. i believe it is a dual layer, not really sure what the difference is in the dual layer.
ahould we add an internal or external. how hard is it to add more memory to the laptop?
thanks

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Looks to me like it's a laptop...right ?
Nov 17, 2006 11:55AM PST

Don't think you could add (note the word ADD) another internal HDD in the notebook ... however you could probably remove the old HDD and install a larger drive (more GBs disk space) in place of the old HDD. You could put the old HDD in an external case and use the it as an external. External enclosures are available for notebook drives.

Dual layer DVD discs hold up to 8.5GBs... regular DVDs hold up to 4.7GB.

For info on RAM, check here:

http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Inspiron+6400

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&category_id=2999&mfgpid=167678

VAPCMD