A Full Hard Drive

[Darius1968]

My desktop computer has 2 internal hard drives - a 1TB drive, and a 500GB drive for all of my media files.  My 2nd 500GB drive is gradually getting closer to being full. 
I just wanted some input as to what is available as an external HD.  What is the present-day capacity for the best price?  Also, is it true that the drives that don't have moving parts, but are strictly a chip set for memory are more reliable and less likely to fail? 

[Mario]

A good site for this kind of question is probably http://www.tomshardware.com/ and their forums for this kind of questions.

[jch2103]

Another (perhaps more geeky) site for reviews/forums is http://www.anandtech.com/

One thing to consider if you're thinking about external drives is whether your computer has USB 3 or other fast interface available. Anything slower is likely to be limiting. It may be simpler in the end to replace the 500GB drive with a larger one. Solid state drives have gotten cheaper and are generally very reliable and certainly faster than hard drives; they are probably better suited (cost/performance reasons) for use as operating system drives rather than media storage. That said, anything electronic or mechanical can fail, so backups of any system are essential.

[Darius1968]

John, thanks for your input.  Unfortunately, until I replace my computer, I'm stuck with USB 2.  However, I'm thinking in tetms of storage and occasional retrieval.  I can always temporarily copy a file to the computer, if I need fast access times
How long does it take to transfer 10 GB over USB 2.0? 

[Mario]

How long does it take to transfer 10 GB over USB 2.0? 

Wikipedia says:

10 Gbit/s
Overview
USB 2.0   High Speed (480 Mbit/s)
USB 3.0   SuperSpeed (5 Gbit/s)
USB 3.1   SuperSpeed+ (10 Gbit/s)

An USB 2.0 slot delivers only about 30 MB per second. If everything works well.

[ubacher]

My suggestion:
Look inside your computer (or have someone with hardware experience look for you)
Is there room to add another hard drive (Physical room, power supply connector and Main board connector)?
    In this case just add a new hard drive.
If not you could just replace the existing 500Gb drive but this leaves you with the problem of how
to get your files transferred.

You can also check if there is an empty slot on the main board for a USB3 add-on board. If so you can add a board to give you USB3 for very little money.
This gives you the option for an external drive at reasonable speed.

And if there is yet another connection for an extra drive available you could add a Solid State Disk and use it as your system disk.
Works wonders for speed!
Switching the system over to the SSD can be done with some clone programs but I am not familiar with this.