I use my laptop to carry out most of my dvd work but fast using up my 100 gb hardrive as you can appreciate with the size of the files.
Can you recommend an external hardrive with usb or fire wire connection so I'm able to conect via my laptop either via usb2 or firewire.
I'm guessing they will have a power supply to plug in.

Would it be possible to get a 500gb
my laptop is a..
Toshiba satellite dual core.
100gb h/drive
1g of ram

Thanks for any advice

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/smileys/smiley1.gif - dannyboy

You have several options.

My HP laptops have two HDD bays each, so I can stick extra SATA drives in them. Western Digital has internal drives up to 320GB right now ($230 at microcenter.com). If you only have space for one drive, you could ideally swap the drives, but getting the boot data to the new drive may proof less than easy.

The external drives go from up to 1TB and more. I've got three 500GB drives, all are Western Digital. Two are USB2 only, and one has both USB2 and Firewire 400. They work fine on the laptop, as I have both Firewire and USB2 on it.

The key is to buy a good drive. Western Digital and Seagate are really the only ones you should consider. My main laptop has a pair of 100GB Hitachi's, and I've had no issues, but that's the only other vendor I'd ever consider. Maxtor is throwing away money (yes, both Seagate/Maxtor are now owned by one company, but the product lines are definitely not the same).

On a side note, I have an extra 1GB (two 512MB chips) of notebook RAM. PC2700 DDR (not DDR2). If you have the same model chips (the freeware tool CPU-Z will tell you what you have), and have two open RAM slots, then it's something to consider.

I will take a look into my lappy to see if I have space, failing that will go for the 500gb external.

I'm running xp home, as I insisted when I purchased the laptop that I wanted xp and not vista. The assistant was trying to push the vista and said "but you will be getting the latest o/s". I got my wayhttp://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/smileys/smiley17.gif

Is there a limit to the amount of external storage that a laptop can use? is this limitation down to the nuber of usb/firewire ports?

what are your thoughts in going through a usb hub if I needed additional ports.
Have read at times, this can be troublesome.
many thanks http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/smileys/smiley1.gif - dannyboy

Sticking to XP was a good move. Vista bigs down so many systems as to make them unusable for a serious task, which is what video work is.

The only limit you have is the in the number of ports available. Firewire can sometimes daisy chain, too. However, I find computers to lag after adding more than two USB2 HDD's. There is some drag to CPU, some latency by the OS, when too many external devices are installed. I try to only use two HDD's by USB2 on a system at any one time, sometimes adding my 3rd backup drive temporarily. It usually sits unplugged.

Don't use an external hub for a hard drive, you need to use a full internal port (technically still a hub, but honestly not the same). External hubs are only good for secondary devices like printers, some scanners (flatbed, NOT film/slide), mice, etc. They have a tendency to go slow, disappear (requires an unplug of hub, or system reboot), etc. Keyboards should never be put in a hub either, nor KVMs.

My laptop has four native ports. My main desktop has seven (6 outside, one only accessible inside the case, for a USBkey or dongle). I find it to be enough on both systems.