What to look for in a portable external hard drive
What do you look
for in a portable external hard drive?
The cost of hard drive
space has been coming down over the last few years, with the
introduction of technologies such as SATA it makes much more
sense to have a portable external hard drive, today they can
really picked up for less than $100, but there are a few point
to think about when looking around for one.
Do you need it to be
portable or ultra portable? Generally they come in two different
physical sizes, 3.5” and 2.5” both have their good and bad
points.
The 3.5” drive is
quite bulky, plus it does require an extra power supply, but on
a positive note it does come in larger sizes, presently up to
1tb. The 2.5” portable external drive is very portable, the
later generation being only slightly bigger than the size of the
physical drive in its case, this means it can easily fit in a
pocket.
Another good point, the drive is powered from its connection to
the computer, meaning no extra power supply. On the downside
smaller external drives do have smaller MB size limits,
currently around 300gb.
So do you really need
hard drive MB space or hard drive physical size? The next point
to look out for is the interface, you really have a choice of 2
types of interface USB or Fire Wire, both USB and Fire Wire come
in different flavors or specifications, with USB make sure your
computer and the portable external hard drive are both USB 2,
this is around 10 times faster than USB1.
Fire Wire although
the later types are faster than USB2, the faster interfaces are
pretty much limited to Macintosh computers and generally not
pc’s.
If you’re not sure if a computer is USB 1 or 2 a simple method
is to plug a USB2 device in and simply wait for the message
you have plugged a high speed device into a low speed port,
which means you have a low speed USB 1 port on your computer. If
that’s the case all is not lost, if you have desktop computer
you can simply add a USB2 PCI card , or for a laptop a PCMCIA
USB2 card.
If you’d like
something a bit more than a simple external hard drive how about
a LAN server? With this you can basically share it between many
different computers.
Search for more
portable external hard drive tips and info
Want something more than a simple
portable external hard drive? Checkout out LAN server article
How to format hard drive
guide , covers partitioning , formatting ...
Need to format your hard drive? , read our how to format hard
drive guide , which covers partitioning , formatting , disk
formats using windows 2000 XP or ...
www.computer-adviser.com/format-hard-drive.html
The Hard Drive Scan Disk
format hard drive window XP, reformatting ...
Learn Everything about Hard Drives from Hard Drive Scan Disk to
Purchasing and Installing.
www.computer-adviser.com/hard-drive-scan-disk.html
Windows chkdsk - detect and
repair errors on your hard drive ...
Windows chkdsk should be your first line of defence when trying
prevent or repair windows disk errors - windows checkdisk is
easy to run with our guides.
www.computer-adviser.com/windows-chkdsk.html
Network hard drive - find
out how to easily share files centrally
Network hard drive file sharing is the latest and perhaps the
best way to share and backup files between two or more pc’s
Thinking of buying an external USB ...
www.computer-adviser.com/network-hard-drive.html
USB hard drive problem -
Insufficient USB power? How to resolve ...
Resolving a USB hard drive problem most of the time is down to
not enough power from the USB port of the computer to the hard
drive find out how to fix.
www.computer-adviser.com/usb-hard-drive-problem.html
computer adviser
portable external hard drive article |