A boomer friend of mine recently asked for my advice about buying a new PC. Since I knew his was only a couple of years old, I asked why he was replacing it. When he said that he wanted a larger hard drive, I was a bit shocked that he hadn't considered just adding a USB hard drive. The problem was, he didn't know about them and since he has a laptop, thought that it would be expensive or impossible to install a larger hard drive.
The price of external hard drives that you can connect to any computer through a USB port has dropped drastically over the past few months. I have seen them as low as $100 for 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of data. That's 1/2 of what I paid for a 250gb drive 2 years ago.
You should consider whether or not you want the external drive to be portable. If you do, you can buy a drive that only needs a USB port for its power. (If your computer is more than 3 years old, you may have 1.1 USB ports. These drives really need 2.0 to function properly.) These are more expensive than the physically larger ones that also require a standard AC adapter and the hassle of needing to plug it in. Of course, if you don't need portability, then you can buy the latter. I have both on my laptop and find the size of the portable one to be very handy when traveling with my laptop.
So if you need extra storage, look for one of these 2 types of units.
External drive with AC power-about 6"x 10"












