The simple answer is: as big as you can afford, a 1TB hard drive is probably the minimum size you should consider. Computer files are getting larger, something you might have noticed, even if you’re just a casual computer user.

Sure it can feel like it’s a waste of money paying for storage capacity that you don’t need right now. But, if you buy a high capacity external hard drive now, then you won’t have to deal with the disruption that changing hard drives can cause.

What’s more, we are all doing more and more with our computers. It’s likely that with new software and applications that you will appreciate the extra space available, rather than scrabbling around deleting files to make room.

This is especially true if you like to to download from the Internet. Many popular television shows and movies can be saved on your computer. These files take up a great deal of space and if you’re a fan of the show, you may not want to delete the files after watching.

Music is another popular download. Many artists, especially new ones, release their songs in MP3 format. Each song isn’t too big but if you have thousands of songs in your library it can quickly take over the space on your computer. Many iPods and MP3 Players can hold many gigabytes of music and then will usually synchronize with your computer, so you need to have the same amount of space on your computer.

For many people, the things that takes up the most space are photos and video. Most people these days use a digital camera and you need to transfer the photos from the camera onto a computer. If you take photos at the highest quality setting then the file size of each photo will be very large. To save space, you can alter the settings on your camera to reduce the quality, or delete the photos that didn’t turn out so well.

Most digital cameras can also record movies. Even a small clip that just lasts a few seconds will require a significant amount of storage.

As you can see there is growing competition for the space on your hard drive. If you want to use your computer and not worry about getting ‘out of space’ error messages, make sure you get at least a terabyte hard drive.