… as I am running out of space on my hardrive, hopefully without burning it all on dvds.
Should I get some kind of an external hard drive and firewire it over (which I have been told my board can do), or are there other, more viable options?
180M? Do you mean 180Gig? 180M won’t even fill up a CD.
What kind of data is it? Some can be compressed successfully, and you can store the Zipped versions online to save some space. Do you have room for another internal harddrive; they’re pretty cheap these days.
180 mb? Megabyte?
That will easily fit on one CD.
Do you mean Gigabyte?
What’s the size of your harddrive?
D’oh, like I say n00b query. Yes is gig, not mb. As far as data, most of it is movies.
Compression software won’t work if most of the data is movies - movie files are already very compressed.
You could stick in a new internal hard drive. Pretty easy to do, and cheaper than a Firewire/USB drive, though not quite as easy. Newegg has 320GB internal SATA drives for $118 after MIR, and the PATA version is $115 if your motheboard is an older one that lacks serial ATA ports.
You can also pick up an external enclosure for these drives like this one - just make sure to buy a drive and enclosure that are the interface type - the one above is PATA IDE, for example.