External Hard Drive ---> Power supply or no? (What do you recommend?)

[blacknblue21]

I need to get a external hard drive and after my research and I have it narrowed down to Seagate Expansion or Seagate Backup Plus. (3TB)

The Seagate Expansion does NOT have a power supply and instead all you need is the usb. The Seagate Backup Plus DOES have the power supply that obviously requires power to run.

I will only be using it to store my movie collection on and it and play them through a media player. (Don't worry, I am not an illegal downloader) So the external hard drive will have to be running while I am playing a movie off of it to my television.

I don't know if it's safer to get the one with the power supply because it won't overheat as easily because of the fan? But then I don't know if that's even a problem.. I'd rather not have to plug in a power supply just out of simplicity but I also can easily plug a power supply in if it has that major of benefits.

Please let me know your knowledge.

 

[kenrivers]

I have both kinds of drives (that is USB powered and AC powered) and have not any problems with the USB powered drives overheating. If it were a laptop I think the advantage of using the one with the power supply would be that it would be less of drain on the battery.