External Hard Drive vs Flash Drive?

I'm a photographer for my student council, and the computers at school only allow us to have 2gigs of memory. On my nikon, I need a lottt of space. At home, I use a portable external hard drive to back up my computer, and my Western Digital didn't need installed. So for school, since things can't be installed by students, I was wondering if external hard drives like this can be used kind of like a flash drive? IF so, itd be great to save pictures to and store.

No not really because external HDD are used mostly for backing up your computer I would go with a SD CARD but you need to see what type it is like a micro SD CARD or whatever.

If you don't mind carrying an external hard drive, then go for it.

I have a ton of photos like 30 gigs and like 100+gigs of vids
and some small 8/16 gigs flash drives won't do it
not even worth the money. Like one of em 8 gigs is like 20 dollars
i got a 320 hdd for like 20 dollars and its like my wallet size
the bigger ones r even cheaper… If you r a student i assume you have a backpack… That hdd is like smaller than a 70 page novel
pretty convenient
besides flash drives tend to get lost easily

MOST USB devices are interchangeable. If you have a flash drive that you use on the school machine, it is likely ANY USB hard disk will work as well since the USB driver for flash drives and external hard drives is the SAME universal driver. You probably could hook up a memory card reader so you could use memory cards directly. I have a 40gb drive which I use to copy off all of my pictures from memory cards. The drive is designed to do this. Plug the card into the drive slot, punch the COPY button and in a few seconds, all of the contents is copied to the hard disk. Then, in the camera, I simply delete all the images and start over. Later, I simply hook the drive to my USB port and I have all of the pictures in one place, instead of carrying several memory cards and using them individually. I actually DO carry several memory cards, but without my portable drive copier, I would need several more on occasion especially for live action video captures. I can put over 40 hours of video on the hard disk if need be.