Saturday, January 28, 2012

Four Method Guidelines For Buying An External Hard Drive

By Kel Shoeman


You can find hundreds-possibly1000's-of different external hard drives out there, so how will you settle on which to buy? The solution is easy once you understand the four criteria for selecting great external hard disc drives.

1. What Size Is Best For You

When I am mentioning the size of the external hard-drive, I am talking about the real capacity and how much data your hard drive can support. Listed here are four distinctive drives that you can buy these days:

1. A Solid State Drive is a hard disk drive that is built to last longer, made on the identical technology as the USB flash stick, but scaled up. These hard drives are not made in overly big capacities but are favored to be more dependable as they are made with less moving elements inside.

2. 50GB-250GB drives that most likely use a USB port to attach to the computer systemare considered small nowadays. At the moment it is handy to have one of these external hard drives but will possiblyrun out of space very fast.

3. Hard drives larger than 250 GB and up to 1 TB are classed as medium-sized and generally have their own power box or eSATA connection. These hard drives are useful for the additional storage area and are a very common selection to buy.

4. Hard drives larger than 1 TB will nearly always need to be plug-in to electricity supply. These external hard drives are often big in size and unwieldy to transport around, so certainly not a mobile storage device. These are great for the house or office though.

2. Brand Does Matter

A large amount of individuals frequently buy any generic item, however where hard drives are concerned, there's no governing board to watch over the companies making the hard drives. Obviously you are not going to take the producers advise for their own product, so you should do research on the internet. I often read testimonials about external hard drives on Amazon.com prior to making a acquisition. This ensures that I get some unbiased opinions to assist me with my purchasing process.

3. External Hard Drives Criteria-The Connection

This is a extremely crucial step to pay attention to as you don't need to pay money for an external hard drive and get it delivered to your home, only to discover the it can not hook up to your computer.

Then there are the other connections you should be aware of: 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)

If you buy an eSATA external hard disk you need to make sure that you have the right port on your computer or laptop to to make sure it works. This sort of hard disk drive sometimes has a 2.0 USB connection which could be a bonus. eSATA also has the greatest data transfer. However, a drive that uses USB 3.0 is perhaps the best all-over selection. It has the quickness of eSATA but is straightforward to connect with virtually every computer system that was purchased in the last 10 years.

4. Is Your External Hard Drive AC or DC?

No, I do not know of any external hard drives that come pre-loaded with music by British rock band AC/DC-but you do need to figure out how to power your external hard drives.

The smaller external hard drives, such as the 2.5" laptop size, often end up having direct current (DC) from your USB connection on your PC. That means that you do not have to connect the hard drive to any other power outlets as it will be utilizing your computer power.

Bigger drives and older drives need separate Alternating Current (AC) connections (even though they use an inverter to convert it to DC). That means you will always need to look for an additional power plug for these drives, which sometimes annoys you. But if you utilize these external hard drives mainly in your own home or the workplace to generate file backups, you'll probably hardly become aware of the additional power cords.




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