choice of external hard drive

Hi,

Thinking of trying Windows 10 before the deadline runs out, but first I want to back up my existing Windows 7 installation.  Not up to speed on hardware, so could anyone tell me if this external drive, WD 1TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0, would be okay to store my Windows 7, in case I want to revert.  If I decide to keep Windows 10 for a time, Windows 7 will be stored on this long-term.

 

I picked a 1TB because my present C: drive is 1TB and apparently they're both supposed to be the same size.

 

Thanks for reading and in advance for any help offered.

hedley

The external can be smaller as a backup image is compressed, also the OS drive is not going to be full, only the used parts are backed up.

 

The 1TB USB3 drive you listed would be good for backup. I use a Samsung 1TB USB3 and backup 3 computers to it, two desktops and 1 laptop. Still room left.

Hi Ztrucker, thanks for the reply. Decided to go with a 500GB of the same description.

If I could indulge your help a bit further, I have two Hitachi Simple drives 1 TB each. To get ready for this upgrade I was doing some maintenance on one of them and having moved the files I had left off it, I started to format it. It has 4 partitions on it and they were all formatting along great, almost 67% each, until we had a power cut.

Since that, the drive will not format. I used Mini Tool Partition Wizard Free on it and it did format at the time. Then the next day, when I was using the pc again, but not that drive, noises coming from my pc prompted me to check what was going on and I found out I had a multitude of messages coming up on screen that I had to format drive ? and drive ? and so on before I could use them. And so it remains.

I don't know if it was the power cut, or if the drive was just ready to give up the ghost, but having 2 of them and they were bought at the same time about 8 years ago, I'm wondering if they are on their way out, or if there is something else I can try to see if I can check their capability to keep using them both.

If not, would the following be okay to replace them given that I use these day and daily to store and transfer files between them and my pc and not just for storage to be unplugged and taken away (Maxtor M3 1TB External Portable Hard Disk Drive USB 3.0 For Windows 10). I have read that NTFS is needed with windows 10, or is that just for the system drive?

Sorry for so many questions at once, so I'll apologize now and thank you in advance again for reading and for your invaluable help.
hedley

Sorry, I have no idea what happened, or why, to the two drives. Almost has to be the power drop.

 

NTFS is the file system, used and preferred for any OS since Windows XP. It supports large drives and gives you the best performance. Definite;y the way to go.

 

Windows 10 also supports FAT and FAT32 but they don't like large drives, so NTFS is your only choice.

 

Ther Maxtor drive sounds like it will be good.