I'm embarrassed at my own ignorance.

I have an older Dell laptop that generally fits my needs (internet, email). Unfortunately, it has a small hard drive and I'm just about out of room (even after defrag).

It's too old for me to consider paying someone to add memory, but I don't really want to get a new machine just for that. I've been looking at portable backup drives (WD, Iomega, etc). Then I noticed another thread about SSD drives.

So: what's the functional difference between them? what would be best for my purposes? Because I want the extra storage for photos (and some music archives), speed isn't as critical as it might be if I needed storage for additional apps. Looking ahead, I think I want at least 160GB, maybe more.

Well Costco sells 1TB external hard drives (non-portable) for just over $100, and 500GB portable hard drives for $100, I'd get the largest I could afford. You do have a USB port on your laptop, right? The advantage of offloading stuff to an external drive is that you can access it from other computers (including when you decide to upgrade to a new machine.)

The SSD drives are more resistant against impacts, as opposed to normal HDD's. If you expect to be pretty rough with your laptop, then get a SSD.

The normal HDD offers are far better bang-for-the-buck. You can get the 2.5" flavour or the normal 3.5" flavour. The 2.5" ones cost a bit more and their capacities aren't as large.

As for cost, check your local computer stores or ask your IT guy where he "gets his stuff". IMO, those quoted prices for Costco are far too high compared to specialty computer stores.

One more word of warning. I don't know how old your laptop is but does it have at least USB2.0? If not, it's going to be slower than molasses.

Ditto on what BLI-flyer said. Get a USB external HD and back up that Dell before it dies. Then, if you want, you can upgrade you internal HD.

Why would you pay someone to upgrade memory? Anyone who can use a Phillips-head screw driver can change or add memory.

Same story for the HD. The trick is to know what HD to order (it's 2.5" but might be either EIDE or SATA). Also, you need either a cable (under $20) or cradle (under $50) to connect your new drive to the laptop via USB port while you clone the drive. Cloning software will probably come with the drive, but if not, there is free cloning software. So you 1) determine the drive type, 2) order the drive & device to connect via USB, 3) connect the new drive externally, 4) clone the old drive to the new, larger drive, and 5) swap the drives. Dell laptop drives are held by screws in a little slide-out cradle, and may have a little connector card on the pins. You unscrew, remove the drive & connector card, put the connector on the new drive, screw it into the cradle, and slide it into the laptop. It's easier to do than describe.

But even if you opt not to upgrade your hard drive, get the external drive. Everybody needs a backup.

I personally like the Samsung Story external drives. Cheap at NewEgg.

If you want reliability get a RAID 1 NAS and backup data to it. If you don't really need that level of redundancy then just stick with a regular HDD drive for backups. SSD are not suitable for backups due to the limited number of read and writes that each cell can handle.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "small," but if the data you want to be sure is backed up (i.e., you could reinstall the apps if need be) then you could use a service like Mozy (which has saved me a couple of times) for free 2GB of backup.

Consider the difference between external and portable drives.

External drives use a separate power supply.

Portable drives are powered from the computer's USB port.

The cost/GB is about double for the portable drives, and they are almost always slower (5400 rpm vs. 7200). Advantage of portable drives is that they are, well, portable. External drives will be larger, and more fussing required because of the power brick, cord, etc.

Some (many?) older laptops don't have enough power in the USB port to power the portable drive. Some drives come with a two-headed USB connector, so you can use two USB ports if needed to adequately power the drive. Additionally, some drives have an optional power port too (Simpletech allows for both).

Recommendation? External, not portable, because I have had reliability problems with a significant percentage of portable drives I've purchased.

For the most part, I would not consider a portable drive as suitable for backup of critical files.

I am maintaining a fleet of notebooks in the family and cloning a new drive is really a routine. Apricorn makes a kit to do that for $35.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-002-_-Product
A PATA drive 160-320GB cost $55-$90.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...889&name=ATA-6
Just do it yourself.

Newegg is selling Hitachi 3.5 1TB drives this afternoon (3/15/10 from 13:00 to 23:59) for 69.99 and free shipping. Now I will read the post

As others have stated get a external 1 or 1.5TB hard drive, the one I mentioned in my previous post would require the purchase of a enclosure. I prefer to get External HD's this way becasue I can then purchase the enclosure of my choice. I would get one that had USB as well as Firewire (you are protecting your investment this way). It is very simple to install a HD into a enclosure so do not be concerned.
Now as to the data, there are different things to consider one is a clone of your existing HD, easy to do more on that later. Or a backup of existing data, this could be simple if you have your data organized in a simple manner. By this I mean if you have everything in your "My Documents" folder you could simply drag that folder over to the new drive and it will copy it. IF you have not organized the data you create in such a fashion I would suggest you do so. I created a folder called 'Data" which has sub-folders by application such as "Picture", "Word", "Excel", you get the idea.
Now back to cloning if you by a drive from Seagate it comes with very good cloning software made for them by Acronis. This software is FREE with the drive (and only works if one of the 2 drives is from Seagate or Maxtor) and is very easy to use. You would start the application and follow the prompts for cloning a drive or you could even use the install new drive feature which the 1st time would do the same thing.
Now there was talk of SSD (Solid State Drives), in your case I would stay away from these for a number of reasons. First the older Dell you are using probably could not support one. Second, they are very expensive of a cost per GB basis., while this is decreasing it is still much higher than a spinning HD. Third, I am still concerned about the life expectancy of the consumer version of these drives especially when used as the only drive in a system. A large number of the less expensive drives to not have Micro--code that supports wear leveling, this may lead to Cell burnout and premature failure of the drive. But from a performance perspective the are excellent.