Portable External Hard Drives
Portable external hard drives provide some important options to computer users, for large businesses, home based businesses, and home computer owners.
Computers quickly fill up with programs, data, and email. But how many people find it easy to back up their data? While CDs, DVDs, flash drives, and even online services are options, portable external hard drives can easily and quickly be used. They are not expensive to buy, certainly not if compared to the potential for disaster if files are not backed up. You know and I know that computers do crash.
One of the most remarkable features of these external hard drives is how portable they truly are. Even the very largest ones (in terms of storage capacity) will still rest on the palm of your hand and often weigh under three pounds. They are smaller than most paperback books. Gone (or going quickly) are the days of huge metal boxes for external drives. Not only are these things amazingly small, but they are quite attractive, as the illustrations at the top of this page indicate. They come in black, silver, red, blue, and other colors as well.
So it’s very easy to take a portable external hard drive from one location to another. Have some things on your desktop and others on your laptop? Move them wherever you want them.
Working at home after putting in a full day at the office? Take all the files you might need along with you on the drive.
Want to show your home videos to family members at a get-together? Take the drive along, assuming your cousin has a computer that isn’t an antique.
One such use that has become popular is among musicians. They can put their latest mp3 files onto such a drive and easily take it to a party for others to listen to on the spot.
These drives provide very inexpensive storage, and they also make it easier to keep your computer’s hard drive from becoming overloaded. Computers run best with a good amount of open space on their hard drives, so if you copied a lot of things over to the portable hard drive, you might notice an increase in performance on the computer.
Of course, it’s always best to have more than one copy of any file that you care about. Even though these drives are very secure, things do happen at times. It’s good to know that USB drive data recovery software does exist, but best if you never need it. Better to have two external drives in order to copy anything you are going to keep permanently on one!
Generally speaking, all USB external hard drives will be slower in the transfer than if you were working with, say, two internal drives in your computer. Firewire is another technology that is faster than USB but less widely known and used.
Portable external hard drives are becoming better and more affordable all the time. That’s partly because they make the security of backup much simpler to keep up with. It’s also because they enhance our lives, as we do our work in the most expeditious way and we can share our creativity with others more easily.
Check out this selection of portable external hard drives