How To Select External Hard Drives

By Author: James.King
Total Articles: 44
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When you need to secure your digital investments from identity theft, viruses, or lack of hard drive space, external hard drives allow you to properly back up or store important information. External hard drives are ideal for large MP3 collections, DVD and movie files, sensitive and personal information, financial documents, digital photo albums, and are a perfect compliment to any sized digital office system. External hard drives are easy to use and relatively inexpensive, with models ranging from small 3.5 models at $15 to those offering the highest quality and most space for several hundred dollars. In addition, external hard drives allow you the flexibility to take data anywhere you go, as they can only weigh a few pounds and are smaller than laptops and notebooks. External hard drives differ in specifications, with some models feature higher speeds, while others sport higher capacities and different interfaces. But before you invest, it is recommended that you understand the differences between external hard drives and select the one that fits your specification needs. Capacity Size Capacity size is often considered ...
... the most important specification when selecting between external hard drives. Portable hard drives are commonly rated in Gigabytes, a billion bytes, or 1GB. Before purchasing your choice of external hard drives, you should know the main use of the drive, and an estimate of data you will immediately place on the drive. If you are planning on using external hard drives for your digital photos, you may want an 80GB model, instead of a 300GB drive. The best way to calculate capacity size is to multiply your current data backup needs by at least three. If your data backups are currently 50GB, do not invest in any external hard drives that are less than 150GB. Your data storage needs will most likely increase over the next few years and you will want a portable hard drive that will grow with you. Cache Size The cache size on a hard drive controls how fast you can copy files to the portable hard drive. Cache is high speed memory on external hard drives that act as a buffer between the computer and the drive. Sometimes the drive cannot keep up with the incoming data stream during transfer, so the cache memory temporarily stores the data so that the computer continues to send data quickly. The larger the cache on the drive is, the faster the files copy over to your drive. When selecting between external hard drives, consider the size of the cache on the drive, and how fast you need it to be. High speed memory used for cache can get expensive, so models with higher cache sizes tend to be more expensive. Interfaces There are two different types of portable hard drive interfaces - USB and Firewire. The most common standard, USB, allows your portable hard drive to copy files extremely fast, as long as there are no other devices using the USB card at the same time. However, USB interfaces have a maximum transfer rate that is determined by the other devices on the interface and involves significant overhead on the computer. Firewire is considered a direct connection to external hard drives, and will copy files much faster than a USB interface. Most external hard drives are capable of supporting both interfaces, but some models will only be capable of either USB or Firewire. Keep this in mind when selecting your portable hard drive. Now that you know how to select external hard drives, choose the best portable hard drive for your data backup needs. Don't fall victim to a sale or bargain bin, shop wisely based on your backup needs, and your external hard drive will be an asset for years to come.

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