By So you have finally made a decision to buy one of external hard drives as a backup option for your laptop or computer. This can be a good decision for you because you are making backing up your computer data faster and simpler than you can actually have imagined. You are also making your computer data much more external in larger quantities than before.
What exactly is an external hard drive?
It’s a disk drive like the one you’ve inside your Laptop or computer, but it is in its own enclosure and sits along side your computer equipment. It connects to your PC via a USB cable or some of them connect to your home router and act as a network drive to be shared between all computers in the home. They commonly tend to have some shock-resistant features because typically they’ll be exposed to more bumps and scrapes than an internal one. Traditionally, external hard drives were mainly regarded as back up devices. So people would copy all of their important data files, audio, movie and pictures to the device and have the comfort of knowing their data was securely “backed up”. They were always expensive and thus not necessarily used in the home, but more of a work tool.
Today, even the best external hard drive doesn’t cost the earth and with disk sizes into the terabytes, people are buying them like they buy memory sticks! They aren’t a lot being used for storing data, but for usable data storage. With downloadable content exploding everywhere, with music, on-demand tv and other media, buyers can’t have enough data storage. When the disk drive is full, you purchase another and hook it up just as you’d a USB stick.
What Should You Look For in an External Hard Drive?
One of the primary features you’ll be considering will be how much data information it may store. This is normally located in megabytes or MB. A regular notebook computer will come with 250GB ( 1000MB =1GB) of storage. A desktop is currently starting to come with 1TB (1000GB = 1TB). So by purchasing something in between these guidelines might be a good bet. Now it does not really matter what kind you get, Mac external hard drives are the same as for the PC. Just be sure to check which operating-system it’s used for before buying.
Price Considerations When Choosing Your External Hard Drives
Price is a big selling point of external hard drives when compared to flash drives (or pen drives, thumb drives, jump drives, and USB sticks). If you are searching for storage space, external hard drives offer much more space for less money. When you are getting into the higher capacity flash drives, like 32GB models, things start getting really expensive. A 32GB flash drive is many times more costly than a conventional external hard drive with up to 5 times the capacity. With the ever increasing need for storing and securing data, and with the prices of external hard drives decreasing, you’ve every reason to choose a high capacity external hard drive. Top rated external hard drives come in 100GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250 GB, 500 GB, 750 GB, 1TB, 1.5 TB and 2TB… capacities. This is a much higher range of capacities than with flash drives which are usually around 2GB and 4GB.
Lifespan of External Hard Drives
External hard drives offer another huge advantage over flash drives: USB flash drives have a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure, and write operations will gradually slow as the device ages. On the other hand, external hard dives offer many more write/erase cycles, and last longer. Consider buying a external hard drive if you will be using your device frequently and are searching for something which will last a long time.
Software and Capacity With External Hard Drives
Many assume that top rated external hard drives are large and expensive and so buy lower capacity flash drives, but this is no longer true. 1″ Micro drives allow manufacturers to make highly compact external data storage devices in capacities up to 12GB. Additionally, there are slightly larger, 1.8″, 2.5″ or 3.5″ external hard drives that go up to 2 TB. These will soon be available in 4TB capacity. You can currently put a 500GB external hard drive in your pocket for a very reasonable price. That much data storage space is impossible with flash based thumb drives.Many hard drive-based external hard drives have included software, for instance, “Single-Touch” data back-up and data encryption. Because flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure, and, lack sufficient capacity for desktop or mobile use, USB External hard drives are the clear choice if you plan to run software from your device.
So you have finally made a decision to buy one of external hard drives as a backup option for your laptop or computer. This can be a good decision for you because you are making backing up your computer data faster and simpler than you can actually have imagined. You are also making your computer data much more external in larger quantities than before.
Top Rated External Hard Drives in 2012:
1. Seagate Expansion 2 TB Hard Drive ST320005EXA101-RK
2. Seagate Expansion 500 GB Portable External Hard Drive ST905004EXA101-RK
3. Western Digital WD Elements 2 TB External Hard Drive
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