2.5" or 3.5" external hard drive

<p>Other than the physical size is one option better than the other. I just want it to back up all my photos on. Also any recommendations on best make or are they all pretty much the same? Not impressed with LaCie though, as my one, after only using it a handful of times over the past two years, seems to have died completely!</p>

<p>3.5" disks are faster and you get more capacity for the money. Your paying for that smaller size. Look for a model with a built in fan (or two, power supply fan, and one for the HD)</p>

<p>3.5 inch drives were designed for desktop computers. In general they are faster, have higher capacity, use more power, and are less expensive than drives designed for laptop computers. They are less rugged than laptop drives; they are designed to stay in one place.</p>

<p>2.5 inch drives were designed for laptop computers. In general they are slower, more expensive, use less power, and have less capacity than desktop drives. However they are more rugged. They are designed to be moved about. They will tolerate more shock than a 3.5 inch drive. Some are designed to sense if they are dropped during use and retract the heads.</p>

<p>If you will be moving your external drive around or transporting it from one site to another, a 2.5 inch drive would be advantageous. If the drive will remain in one location, then a 3.5 inch drive would be better.</p>

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<p>Make sure to click the "remove hardware safely" icon in the task bar before removing an external drive. If you forget, that may cause a drive to fail prematurely.</p>

<p>Actually depending on the connection type (usb vs. e-sata) they could perform equally. A USB connection has a much lower throughput (roughly 30MB/s) than either the 2.5" or 3.5" drive can handle. If the connection is E-SATA (possibly over 100MB/s) which I strongly recommend if your computer/motherboard has it, then the 3.5" drive will generally outperform the 2.5" drive. The exception being Western Digital's Velociraptor. As others have said, you generally pay a bit more for the smaller drives, not always, though, depending on where you look. </p>

<p>I have both but prefer the bigger ones. They are cheaper and have larger capacity. Terabyte capacity "bricks" are now becoming commonplace and relatively cheap - I have seen them for around $160 Australian. I have two smaller capacity ones (they are a couple of years old but were considered BIG in their day) which sit by my PC and do not need to be moved so why bother with the more expensive and even smaller capacity portable version. I have had drives die on me but every time it has been the HDD enclosure not the drive itself - thankfully. I think the power supplies can be dodgey and tend to pass away prematurely if you are unlucky. But if so its a trivial task to buy a new enclosure on eBay and recover the drive from the other box thenswap it over. I have a small portable drive but it is mainly for moving files about the place - if say, I want to take pictures to work. But even here this is becoming overtaken by thumbdrives. I bought an 8 gig thumbdrive very cheaply the other day and 32 gig (I think perhaps even 64 gig ) ones are coming onto the market. In a couple of years they will be quite cheap and then it gets harder to justify a portable drive.</p>

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<p>Make sure to click the "remove hardware safely" icon in the task bar before removing an external drive. If you forget, that may cause a drive to fail prematurely.</p>

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<p>Perhaps that's true on a MAC (I don't know), but that's not true in Windows. A USB device is 'hot-swappable', BUT if it is a STORAGE device, you have the ability to enable 'write caching' in the drive's properties>policies. That cache is temporary so that's when you use 'safely remove hardware'. But that's not true with write caching disabled AKA 'Optimize for quick removal', where it says it will disable write caching so you can remove the drive without using 'safely remove hardware' - this is written in the 'Policies' tab of the drive's properties.</p>

<p>So just don't enable write caching - the default (USB is to slow for it to make a difference anyway) - and plug and unplug at will. I've been doing that for years without issue.</p>

<p>But also remember that 3.5" drives aren't meant to be knocked around as much as 2.5" drives, so treat them somewhat gently.</p>

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<p>If the connection is E-SATA (possibly over 100MB/s) which I strongly recommend if your computer/motherboard has it</p>

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<p><a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132014">These</a> are available if you need to add eSATA to any PC. Others have just eSATA.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145167">This</a> is the enclosure I'm getting so I can use eSATA at home, and still be able to use USB on any PC without the faster connector if I want to share photos.</p>

<p>This is pretty much covered. I sometimes use a 500 GB Apricorn drive (2.5") when I want something small to plug into my laptop -- also the smaller 2.5 drives often do not require a power supply, making them a lot neater for some uses.</p>