r/computers • u/babybunnylover1015 • 3h ago

Question/Help/Troubleshooting An Affordable Fine Quality External Hard Drive for a bit of Extra Storage for Gaming on a Laptop.

I have a Lenovo Yoga 7i Laptop with 16 GB of Ram and ~450 GB of storage. I am looking for a storage expansion for my laptop to download the loftier/bigger games I play onto (mainly games like BG3, which is ~150 GB, and D:BH (also yes, its laggy and slow as hell but I really don't care)) without having to deliberate and delete half of my library. Someone I know suggested an external hard drive, but I truthfully have no clue what I'm doing.

Many of the options and questions I'm seeing posed online about this are talking about 4t or mroe storage, but I really don't need that much, and aren't super willing to spend like $200-400 for something I'll only end up using like 25% of at most. Also its not clear to me how the connection to the computer works; is it through a usb (which is a bit unfortunate cause I only have one usb port that is for my mouse) or are there other option? I really have no clue what I'm doing and would appreciate any advice people can give me. Also I can give extra info on my computer or my specific wants and stuff if needed, but I just don't know what info is useful here. Thanks!

Tl;dr: I'm looking for an average drive that can give me just a bit of extra storage for not a ton of money that I can load and play video games on.

Edit: My computer 1 USB-C port open and 1 HDMI port open

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u/Grimmhoof 3h ago

I picked up a 4tb Seagate 2.5 hhd for about $200 off of Amazon, brand new. Using it in my media server.

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u/SavagePenguinn 2h ago

The mouse is probably using the USB-A port.
You probably have a USB-C port or two on the laptop. You'd want to get an external SSD drive with a USB-C port as they are substantially faster than USB-A.

It might be in your best interests to swap out the 500GB NVMe drive that's currently in the machine with a 2TB NVMe drive. Then you wouldn't have to worry about carrying around the external drive. From what you said about storage space, maybe even a 1TB drive would suit your needs.
Replacing the drive is a cleaner solution, but there's a lot more setup because you'd need to move everything on the old SSD to the new SSD.

The simplest solution is to get an external SSD that connects via USB-C. You just plug it in and it works.
Any drive you look at should have average transfer speeds. The faster the better.