Do I need an external Hardrive?

Hey this might sound like a stupid question but im new to macs so please bear with me!

I've just recently bought a macbook pro and im wondering if i need to buy an external hardrive for it? At the moment i have about enough music movies and photos to fill about 3 quarters of the internal hard drive and i'm wondering if this will slow down my mac over time? With my old dell pc this was the case so is it the same with macs? that by using up the space on the internal hard drive you slow down the computer??

Any help is much appreciated

Do I need a speedboat? ...

Anyway, if you can say goodbye to some of your data over time, then you don't need an external drive ... having a quarter of free space is just fine and won't slow down your computer. It will get slower if you have low RAM and the drive gets over 90% capacity. Of course I'm just saying that number at random, but you get the point.

Although I would recommend an external drive for backups, but that's a different issue.

yeah you do! Treat yourself

so as long as i dont fill up the internal hard drive im fine?

im sorry but im not altogether there with computer terms (and im young so apparently i should be... opps )
i have 4 gb of ram and its a brand new machine how wuld my ram get low?


Again these might be silly questions but go on humor me

By low RAM I meant that you have lots of applications running at once using up most of your RAM - so let me rephrase the my original post: If you have little RAM available?

But with 4Gb you probably don't need to worry about that. And yes, as long as the internal drive isn't maxed out, then you shouldn't see any dramatic performance drop. I have a 250Gb drive and start moving files away usually when I get down to 20 or 10Gb of free space.

Ah cool,

Thanks for that scathe

They are also handy for backing up w/ Time Machine in case your system takes a dump. Since it's a newer computer that you'd probably be using it on I don't think you would have a problem for a while, but it's better to have everything backed up than have your computer kick the bucket and lose an important paper for school/work.