4 Tips To Buying External Hard Drives
There are actually many-possibly thousands-of different external hard drives in the marketplace, so how could you come to a decision on which one to purchase? The answer is plain to see as soon as you know the four criteria for choosing great external hard drives.
1. What Size Is Best For You
When I am talking about the size of the external hard disk drive, I mean the real capacity and the amount of files your hard drive can support. Here are four different drives that you can buy today:
1. Solid State Drives (SSDs) that use identical technology as the small USB sticks except scaled up to produce high capacity external disk drives. These use less power than conventional hard drives, but they're also a lot slower.
2. Smaller sized external hard drives can be anywhere from 20GB upwards to 250 GB. These hard drives can usually be plug-in via USB connection and are very painless to carry around, but the restricted capacity may not suit everyone's basic needs in this day and age.
3. Medium (250GB to 1TB) may perhaps require an external power supply or an eSATA port which will drain your laptop battery quicker. These hold plenty of saved files, but they might work slowly on old pcs.
4. Maximum (1TB or greater) nearly always call for external power-and many of the biggest drives in this market in fact combine two drives using a RAID array so they will look like a single large drive. These make great backup hard drives, but they're awfully expensive and unwieldy to carry around with you all the time.
2. External Hard Drives Criteria-Brand
Regrettably no one is keeping an eye on the external hard drive manufacturers and as a result the quality varies significantly. The very best way to seek out if you are purchasing the right external hard drive is to check out the reviews on the net from others. I like to look at Amazon.com and observe what people have said, check their evaluations and comparisons, and then make my mind up. This is the far better approach, rather than dashing in and buying the very first external hard drive you see.
3. External Hard Drives Criteria-The Connection
This can be a pretty important step to take note of as you do not want to purchase an external hard drive and get it home, only to discover the it can not hook up to your computer.
Then there's the other connection types you should consider: 1. eSATA (you need a special connection) 2. USB 2.0 (same as USB 1.1) 3. USB 3.0 (can work with USB 2.0 or 1.1) 4. Firewire (not often used)
Usb connected external hard drives are fantastic and easy to connect to your computer, however the USB 3.0 is greatly suggested, as it can be compatible for the majority computer systems. The USB 2.0 isn't recommended for all new type pcs, as it will work but will have slower file transfer. ESATA sometimes also has a USB plug but if it does not you should make sure your computers eSATA is compatible with the external hard-drives connection.
4. Is Your Power AC/DC
Stop humming a tune from the UK band AC/DC music list. That seriously isn't what I meant by ACDC. We would like to be aware of what power your external hard drive is going to use.
Smaller hard drives are usually powered by the Direct Current (DC) that your USB port can supply. This means you need not worry about extra power cords. But it also means that these hard drives will suck up your notebook power supply sooner.
External hard drives that have alternating current (AC) will come with a power cord that needs to be attached to a power outlet. Although these larger and older hard drives usually use less electricity from your PC, they also come with messy cords that need to be plugged in. Although this power is converted to DC by an inverter, the cords nonetheless exist and will make it less convenient.
1. What Size Is Best For You
When I am talking about the size of the external hard disk drive, I mean the real capacity and the amount of files your hard drive can support. Here are four different drives that you can buy today:
1. Solid State Drives (SSDs) that use identical technology as the small USB sticks except scaled up to produce high capacity external disk drives. These use less power than conventional hard drives, but they're also a lot slower.
2. Smaller sized external hard drives can be anywhere from 20GB upwards to 250 GB. These hard drives can usually be plug-in via USB connection and are very painless to carry around, but the restricted capacity may not suit everyone's basic needs in this day and age.
3. Medium (250GB to 1TB) may perhaps require an external power supply or an eSATA port which will drain your laptop battery quicker. These hold plenty of saved files, but they might work slowly on old pcs.
4. Maximum (1TB or greater) nearly always call for external power-and many of the biggest drives in this market in fact combine two drives using a RAID array so they will look like a single large drive. These make great backup hard drives, but they're awfully expensive and unwieldy to carry around with you all the time.
2. External Hard Drives Criteria-Brand
Regrettably no one is keeping an eye on the external hard drive manufacturers and as a result the quality varies significantly. The very best way to seek out if you are purchasing the right external hard drive is to check out the reviews on the net from others. I like to look at Amazon.com and observe what people have said, check their evaluations and comparisons, and then make my mind up. This is the far better approach, rather than dashing in and buying the very first external hard drive you see.
3. External Hard Drives Criteria-The Connection
This can be a pretty important step to take note of as you do not want to purchase an external hard drive and get it home, only to discover the it can not hook up to your computer.
Then there's the other connection types you should consider: 1. eSATA (you need a special connection) 2. USB 2.0 (same as USB 1.1) 3. USB 3.0 (can work with USB 2.0 or 1.1) 4. Firewire (not often used)
Usb connected external hard drives are fantastic and easy to connect to your computer, however the USB 3.0 is greatly suggested, as it can be compatible for the majority computer systems. The USB 2.0 isn't recommended for all new type pcs, as it will work but will have slower file transfer. ESATA sometimes also has a USB plug but if it does not you should make sure your computers eSATA is compatible with the external hard-drives connection.
4. Is Your Power AC/DC
Stop humming a tune from the UK band AC/DC music list. That seriously isn't what I meant by ACDC. We would like to be aware of what power your external hard drive is going to use.
Smaller hard drives are usually powered by the Direct Current (DC) that your USB port can supply. This means you need not worry about extra power cords. But it also means that these hard drives will suck up your notebook power supply sooner.
External hard drives that have alternating current (AC) will come with a power cord that needs to be attached to a power outlet. Although these larger and older hard drives usually use less electricity from your PC, they also come with messy cords that need to be plugged in. Although this power is converted to DC by an inverter, the cords nonetheless exist and will make it less convenient.
About the Author:
Hard drives are an extremely crucial part of computer maintenance because it delivers cheap file storage options.
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