External Hard Drives?

Well, my computer only started off with 40G of space, and right now i only have about 1G left(after defraging, which didn't help much at all). So, I was wondering about these external hard drives. I am a little confused on how they exactly work. Are they just a thing to back up files on? Or are they an extension of your pre-existing hard drive? If people could answer these questions, i would be extremely happy.

Thanks a lot for all the help,

Jimmy

I have a External Hard drive for my movies and stuff and you normaly just plug the drive into the USB port, turn it on and you can transfer your files to the external.

External drives are great for storing data (video, pictures, etc.), but you may run into problems if you install programs on them and don't leave them plugged in permanently. If you want to go that route I would try to move all of your data that you're just storing from your current drive onto the external and try to save room on your internal drive for programs and such.

So, from what it sounds, people use it as a storage device? I'm still a little confused though, could it just be used as an extension to your hard drive if you leave it plugged in all the time?

Thanks to all for the responses so far though, they have helped a lot.

It'll be like another Local Disk C besides the fact it can get unplugged. Thats why people use it to store things instead of installing programs. For example if you install guildwars on your external drive, but then unplugged it while playing the game, Guildwars would crash.

It is for this reason many people keep their pictures/videos and all the stuff that dont use the hard drive dynamically (I hope i used that word correctly).

Thanks scrinner, that certainly cleared things up.

If I understand what you're asking, then no, an external hard drive will not be an 'extension' of your current internal drive. That is, if you plug in an external 40gig hard drive, your "C:" drive will not become 80gig (40+40). Instead, the external hard drive will be assigned it's own 'drive letter' by windows.
If, for example, you have a floppy (A, an internal hard drive (C, and a CDROM/burner (D, then the external drive will become E: (depending upon what other drives or divices you have installed)
If you want to use the external to store data you would copy all your mp3's, videos, etc. (and their folders) to this "E:" drive (and delete them from C and from then on you would save such things to E: instead of C:. For instance, if a program wants to save an mp3 to C:\my music\randommusic.mp3, you would change that to E:\my music\randommusic.mp3

If you want to avoid having to keep track of where things are being saved, then your best option would be to replace the internal hard drive with a bigger one. Using "Ghost" or some similar program you could transfer the contents of the old hard drive, including the OS, to the new drive. If you are unfamiliar with things such as connecting hard drives together etc. (which I assume you are ), then you can probably get the place you buy the hard drive from to do it for you (for a fee, of course). If you happen to live in HRM, give me a call, I'll do it for you. (If you don't know what HRM stands for, you don't live there )

Another problem with external hard drives is that they are limited in the speed at which data can be transferred over the USB connection.
In addition, external drives are spinning up all the time rather than only when actually being accessed. This means that they tend to wear out faster than internal drives and come with a much shorter warrenty.