Recommendation for memory/storage?

[VinSen]

Had an issue with a WD easy store external hard drive about to crap out and wanted to get the data off of it. I wanted to know what's the better investment/decision: new external hard drive replacing the WD one, or just upgrade my PC memory. My PC memory is 2tb, and my PC is only a little over 1 year so I'm not super worried about it dying out yet. But I'm running out of space on my PC and wanted to know if I should either upgrade the size despite not really needing to worry that much about it, or just get an external hard drive? It's to move over the hopefully not corrupted data from my old WD external to a new one, while also holding onto the current stuff I want to store from my PC. I'm not sure what the best route is. If it's an external hard drive what brand do you all recommend? WD personally hasn't been my favorite, but this one is also older so maybe it's changed. 

 

Also the WD drive has stuff that was formatted on macbook first... I've been told that I may need something that'll be able to read the data on PC because of that formatting. So do you have any recommendations on that too? Is there like a reformatting program or something?

[Donut417]

35 minutes ago, VinSen said:

Also the WD drive has stuff that was formatted on macbook first..

The file formats are not the issue. It's the Filesystem that the drive is formatted in thats the issue. ExFAT for example is universally supported across most OS's. However Windows uses NTFS and Mac use APFS. The fact is if the drive was formatted to your Mac then your PC wouldn't see any of the files. If it's formatted in ExFAT then both OS's would be able to see the contents. 

 

 

39 minutes ago, VinSen said:

My PC memory is 2tb, and my PC is only a little over 1 year so I'm not super worried about it dying out yet. But I'm running out of space on my PC and wanted to know if I should either upgrade the size despite not really needing to worry that much about it, or just get an external hard drive? I

Do you need portable storage? If not Id just add storage to your PC.