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The Facts About External Hard Drives

December 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Although some top-ten lists describe external hard drives to their readers in terms of qualities like “stylish” or “rugged,” there are more substantial factors to consider. If you’re looking to buy an external hard drive, then here are the facts you should know before making your purchase.

  1. While considering a storage device for your most important information and memories, consider capacity and interface, along with quality and price. You will be storing things that are irreplaceable. Would you put your university degree on top of the fridge for safe storage? What about placing your birth certificate in the kitchen rubbish drawer? Treat your information as though it is valuable.
  2. A power switch is a definite plus if you want to save energy, keep your drive from burning out quickly, and enjoy leaving things plugged in and accessible.
  3. Connectivity speed matters. If you are planning to dump your 900 GB media library into your external hard drive as soon as you get home, you’ll want a fast operating system.
  4. 1,000 GB is a lot of space for someone who needs to store a few documents. Figure out how much storage you want and only pay for what you actually need.
  5. Some external hard drive options cost just 12 cents per GB. But in the case of this storage media, cheaper isn’t necessarily better. Do a little research, and you’ll find that, while some brands may be a great deal, others typically range from 19 to 22 cents per GB. Price generally reflects quality, so try to find a device that falls within the average price range.
  6. USB, FireWire, or eSATA? It’s your choice, but only if you consider it before making a purchase.
  7. Another issue that isn’t always given due regard is the wall plug. Do you need an external hard drive that simply connects via USB, without a wall plug?
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I’m Backin’ Up, Backin’ Up

December 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Hard drive sizes are growing ever larger – it used to be that several megs of storage space was a lot, and now you can buy an external hard drive with terabytes of storage. You’ll want to, too, because the files people transfer and store are also growing ever larger. If you have lots of documents and music and photos and so on, you’ll want to back them up, which means to make copies of them for safety’s sake. Many people don’t realize how critical this is, because so much technology just seems to keep on working and people replace things with newer models before the old ones break, but it would be a mistake to write off the importance of data backup.

Consider your music collection. If you’re a typical user of iTunes or Amazon MP3, you’ve likely downloaded your fair share of paid content, from single tracks to entire musical albums, for which you may not have any physical copy. The one copy of the album you have is stored on your computer, so what happens if that computer breaks? You may just have lost all that content and the time and money you invested in it.

One way to make copies is to burn them to a physical medium like a CD or DVD, which many people do, and it’s nice to have that copy to hold in your hands and use in other machines. But that process requires the expense of buying the physical media and the time to copy the content to it and provide any applicable labeling. Why not get an external hard drive instead? You can get one with abundant capacity for relatively little money, and they come with programs that will automatically backup your data for you, on a regular schedule if you like. Don’t be caught unaware – backup your data.

Filed Under: Data Storage Tagged With: , ,
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