• Determine Your Data Storage Needs

• Start Burning Backup CDs and DVDs

• Select a Hard Drive

• Find Drives and Burners on eBay

• Buy Drives and Burners With Confidence

Determine Your Data Storage Needs

Determine Your Data Storage Needs

With careful archiving, you will probably never need to delete electronic documents, digital photos, or digital music files again. When determining what kind of storage device you need to buy, choose between optical drives, such as CD burners and DVD burners, and hard drives.

• Optical drives: Optical drives, better known as burners, provide flexibility, allowing you to quickly burn to CD or DVD media, and then play back the media on any computer with a CD or DVD drive.

• Hard drives: Hard drives with more than 400 gigabytes of space are a better option for storing and transferring large files such as uncompressed video and audio.

When choosing a storage device, decide if you want to install it in your computer or keep it outside your computer.

• Internal drives: Internal hard drives, CD burners, and DVD burners fit into open bays in your computer. They cost less than external drives and require that you open your case for installation.     

• External drives: External hard drives, CD burners, DVD burners, and portable Flash drives connect to your computer over high-speed USB 2.0 or FireWire (IEEE 1394). You can quickly unplug them and use them with other computers. External hard drive sizes range from small ultraportable drives to larger drives capable of holding more than 500 gigabytes of data.

Also supplement your storage with a Flash drive, a must-have accessory for anyone who needs to frequently transfer small files, such as Microsoft Word documents, from one computer to another. Small, ultraportable Flash drives, also called "thumb drives" or "jump drives," from Sandisk, Lexar, and Kingston store more than 256 megabytes of data, easily fit into your pocket, and plug directly into your computer's USB port. With no moving parts, they're more rugged than external hard drives.

Start Burning Backup CDs and DVDs

Start Burning Backup CDs and DVDs

Iomega, Sony, and Plextor all make popular CD burners and DVD burners. Besides backing up text, you can burn photo slideshows or create your own movies.

Select a CD burner

CD burners come in two major varieties: CD-R burners and CD-RW burners.

• CD-R burners: CD-R (compact disc-recordable) burners write to CD-R media only once. Finished discs, such as audio CDs, are read-only.

• CD-RW burners: CD-RW (compact disc-rewritable) burners can write to CD-RW media multiple times.

CD-R media and CD-RW media can hold up to 800 megabytes of data, depending on disc storage capacity.

Dive into DVD burners

DVD burners record at different speeds from CD burners, with 1x equaling 1.39 megabytes per second, and come in five major formats: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM.

• Make movies: Choose a DVD-R or DVD+R burner if you want to create DVDs that can play back on most set-top DVD players. You'll only be able to write to the media once.    

• Back up data to DVD: Rewritable DVD+RW and DVD-RW drives work best for people who want to archive data to DVD. DVD+RW media and DVD-RW media cost less than DVD+R media and DVD-R media, and you can write to the discs multiple times. Buy media that matches your type of drive. Both types of drives can also record to CD-R and CD-RW media.

DVD formats mostly differ in the companies that adhere to their standards. Apple, Hitachi, NEC, Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, and Toshiba support the DVD-R and DVD-RW formats while Dell, HP, Philips, Sony, Ricoh, and Yamaha support DVD+R and DVD+RW.

DVD-RAM, a sophisticated rewritable format, allows on-disc editing and simultaneous recording and playback. Unfortunately, it's not compatible with many DVD players.

Some DVD burners are now capable of burning in double (or dual) layers, essentially doubling the amount of data you can store on a single DVD. A single-layer DVD can hold 4.7 gigabytes of data while a dual-layer DVD can hold 8.5 gigabytes.

Use a combo drive for 2 in 1

Combination drives, such as DVD+RW/-RW drives and CD-R/RW drives, can burn to at least two types of CDs or DVDs. The name of the drive indicates which formats the burner supports.

Burning speeds explained

Speed differentiates burners. You'll see two numbers indicating maximum read and write speeds on CD-R burners, DVD-R burners, and DVD+R burners. Three numbers appear on CD-RW drives, DVD+RW drives, and DVD-RW drives, indicating maximum read speed, write speed, and rewrite speed.

Select a Hard Drive

Select a Hard Drive

Maxtor hard drives, Seagate hard drives, Western Digital hard drives, and LaCie hard drives are all popular hard drives. Evaluate speed and cache size when comparing hard drives.

• Hard drive disk speed: Most hard drives spin at 7,200 revolutions per minute (RPM). This speed supports most tasks, including work with large video and audio files. If you work exclusively with small files, save a few bucks by finding a hard drive that spins at 5,400 RPMs.    

• Hard drive cache: Hard drives typically have a 2 megabytes cache to help manage data retrieval. If you work with large video files, audio files, or other data-rich files, you’ll need 8 megabytes of cache.

Hard drives with one-touch backup allow you to easily copy data from one drive to another. Designate the files, folders, or partitions you want to back up and press a button to copy information automatically.

Network your hard drive

Anyone can access a network drive, even if it's not connected to a computer. Many network drives Ethernet connections and use IP or DHCP to connect. External hard drives can be networked, allowing multiple computers to use them for storage, and some network drives can even be configured in a RAID (redundant array of independent disks).

RAID allows multiple smaller hard drives to function together, adding their combined capacity to create a larger storage unit. RAID also allows for redundancy, or mirroring. With mirroring, data is written to two hard drives at the same time. If one hard drive has an error, the data survives on the other. There are other levels of RAID usage, but they are not very common in home networking.

Find Drives and Burners on eBay

Find Drives and Burners on eBay

Once you know what type of storage drive or burner you want, go to the Computers & Networking portal, click Drives, Controllers & Storage, and start searching for item listings on eBay.

• Categories: The Categories list on the left side of each page will help you narrow down your listings by item type. You'll find links for Blank Media, DVD-RW/+RW Drives, Burners, Hard Drives—External, Zip, Jaz, Flash Memory Drives, and more. As you dig deeper into the site, you'll be able to further narrow down your choices.    

• Keyword search: Search eBay listing titles for specific words. For example, if you want to find a Flash drive, type “flash drive" (without quotation marks) into the Search box. Click "Search title and description" to expand your results. Visit eBay's Search Tips page for more tips on searching with keywords.

If you can't find exactly what you want, try shopping eBay Stores, tell the eBay Community what you want by creating a post on Want It Now, or save a search on My eBay and eBay will email you when a match becomes available.

Buy Drives and Burners With Confidence

Buy Drives and Burners With Confidence

Before making your purchase, make sure you know exactly what you're buying, research your seller, and understand how eBay and PayPal protect you.

Know your purchase

Carefully read the details in item listings.

• Figure delivery costs into your final price. If you spend a lot of money, make sure the seller will insure the item when it ships.

• If you want more information, ask by clicking the "Ask seller a question" link under the seller's profile.

• Always make sure to complete your transaction on eBay (with a bid, Buy It Now, or Best Offer). Transactions conducted outside of eBay are not covered by eBay protection programs.

• Never pay for your eBay item using instant cash wire transfer services through Western Union or MoneyGram. These payment methods are unsafe when paying someone you do not know.

Know your seller

Research your seller so you feel positive and secure about every transaction.

• What is the seller's Feedback rating? How many transactions have they completed? What percentage of positive responses do they have?

• What do buyers say in their Feedback? Did the seller receive praise?

• Most top eBay sellers operate like retail stores and have return policies. Do they offer a money-back guarantee? What are the terms and conditions?

Buyer protection

In the unlikely event that a problem arises during your transaction, eBay and PayPal are there for you.

• Pay safely with PayPal: PayPal enables you to pay without the seller ever seeing your bank account or credit card numbers. In fact, PayPal protects buyers 100% against unauthorized payments from their accounts. Plus, with PayPal Buyer Protection, your purchase can be covered up to $1,000.

• eBay Security & Resolution Center: Visit the Security & Resolution Center to learn how to protect your account and use eBay's quick and efficient resolution tools.