storing music

<p>pretty soon ill be getting a laptop for college. one thing im concerned about is i have A LOT of music, and im always updating my library. I dont want to clog up my computer or anything though. i want to have all my music but still have space for other things. whats the best way to deal with this? should i get an extrenal hard drive for my music? are certain laptops better for storing lots of music?</p>

<p>See if you can get the laptop hard drive upgraded to one with higher capacity. Otherwise, you won’t have access to your music when you are on the go.</p>

<p>ok. how much do you think i would need to add?</p>

<p>depends on your music collection. If its massive (100GB or more), spend the extra cash and get a 500 or 750GB 2.5" SATA Hard drive. I personally have an iTunes library totaling over 140GB. With a 500GB HDD though, I still have alot of room for my applications and anything else I’d like to put on my computer. They even make 1TB laptop hard drives now which is pretty cool, but I think it would be really overkill unless you had a large video collection to go along with your music (each SD movie ~1GB.) A 500 should cost you about $75 to install yourself which is usually a really simple job.</p>

<p>thanks thats very helpful!</p>

<p>You could always go buy and external hard drive and keep most of your music on that and leave the stuff you listen to the most on your laptop’s hard drive</p>

<p>My recommendation, go on a tech site like newegg and pick an internal hard drive and an external enclosure.</p>

<p>Some drives I recommend:
320gb western digital scorpio black (2.5")
500gb western digital scorpio black (2.5")
750gb seagate momentus (2.5’)
500gb Samsung spinpoint F3 (3.5")
1TB western digital caviar black (3.5")
2TB Samsung spinpoint F4 (3.5")</p>

<p>2.5" drives are listen under laptop hard drives.</p>

<p>2.5" vs 3.5": Form factor and cost per GB. The 2TB spinpoint F4 for example is less than the 750gb 2.5" drive, though you will notice that one is bigger. Both are generous in terms of space but the 2TB just necessitates you save pretty much whatever you’d like to keep.</p>

<p>After you decided the drive, pick an enclosure (for your practical purpose not a dock) that is used for your drive’s size and then choose the fastest I/O your laptop has (thunderbolt > USB 3.0 > eSATA > USB 2.0) and pick a well-rated case. There is one consideration though with your drive’s interface (SATA vs SATA II) but that is just something you can crosscheck with anyone with tech knowledge.</p>

<p>The instructions should be easy, enclosures are not hard to add a drive to.</p>

<p>I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS AS OPPOSED TO BUYING A PREASSEMBLED EXTERNAL DRIVE. This way you know what drive you have an how reliable it is, because if you have a shoddy poor drive it can easily overheat, lose connection, or to many unfortunate folk ultimately fail. With putting together your own external it is less likely to cause you grief.</p>

<p>If you want further advice on external Harddrives, feel free to PM me. I’m speaking with experience from both pre-assembled and self-assembled external HDDs and can comment in detail more or help you in some other way.</p>

<p>The general consensus on best 7200 rpm hdds are samsung spinpoint F3
I personally like WD caviar blacks as well</p>

<p>Sent from my Droid using CC App</p>

<p>ok thanks ill look into that!</p>

<p>one laptop im looking at has a few options for the hard drive. one is 500 gb at 5400 rpm, one is 500 gb at 7200 rpm, and one is 750 gb at 5400 rpm. which is best?</p>

<p>7200 rpm.
[/10char]</p>

<p>Its nice that hard drive upgrades are so cheap now. Most harddrives are much bigger than what the average consumer nowadays needs anyway. I have about 3,400 songs in my library and still have more than half the space left on my 200gb partition. Though if all my music was in a lossless format this would be a problem.</p>

<p>The 7,200 is technically faster but I doubt there would be any noticeable if it is just being used for storing music and other documents.</p>

<p>If money is tight it is pretty cheap to buy a laptop with a bigger harddrive already in it. I’m on one website now and it is only $30 more to upgrade from 320 gb to 500gb.</p>

<p>Hes talking about the internal HD in which case yes he does have a huge advantage choosing 7200rpm.</p>

<p>she. goldandblue92 is a she.</p>

<p>I’m not a very computer-savvy person but I have to say I really like having an external harddrive for my music. It’s great because it will back up your music (and files, too), which gives me a lot of comfort in case something happens to my computer.</p>

<p>i ended up getting a laptop with 500 gb 7200 rpm hard drive, hopefully this is enough…</p>

<p>I am almost positive it is enough. I highly doubt you have more than 100GB of music. Your OS is going to take up some space and then some essential programs. Delete all the initial bloatware that comes with the laptop. Unless all your files are FLAC, you will not have a problem with music storage.</p>

<p>Yeah FPSconor is right. I used to really overestimate how much space I would need for my media, going as far as buying a Tb hard drive for my desktop. I have a LARGE media college, about 200gb, but I never even came close to filing up that hard drive. My media, operating system, steam games, and file storage only took up about 350-400gb worth of space. Hard Drive storage is really cheap now (3.5" drives are at least) so it only ended up being $50, but I ended up with about 600gb that I never touched. Get a tb if you really need it, but otherwise just stick with a 500 or so and you’ll be fine.</p>

<p>This might be a stupid question, but how would I find and delete said bloatware?</p>

<p>Bloatware programs are the programs that come with the laptop when it is bought. Delete the ones that you know you will never use. All they do is take up space and if you are trying to be conservative, delete them. Do this by going to Control Panel –> Programs –> Unistall a Program. Find them on the list and remove them.</p>