What you need to know before buying an external hard drive
When did you first come across an external hard drive? Usually in a heavily fortified casing as fragile as eggshells it was a monster on your desk. An extra forty gigabytes memory for your computer is what, if you were lucky, you may have gained. Today's market in comparison allows you to carry mass amounts of storage in your pocket as long as it is not filled with change. External hard drives today are stronger, better performing and less expensive than when they first appeared in the 1980's.
Essentially an external hard drive is designed to give extra storage. Connected to your desktop or laptop externally using fire-wire or USB ports they are an increasingly popular tool in the mobile age. As they can still be prone to damage from knocks and vibrations an outer casing gives protection to the hard drive. Essentially this is due to how they are constructed.
A magnetised rotating disk that can rotate at a mind-boggling seven thousand rpm is within the hard drive casing. The disks are prone to damage and decreased performance just like a CD or DVD. Laptops have smaller discs and thus fewer rotations per minute tend to mean a decreased performance. Normally quoted in gigabytes or even terabytes the capacity of a hard drive these days is, a far cry from the megabyte age of zip and floppy disks. They are getting much smaller but they still vary in size. In today's market with portable hard drives and pen drives you can basically take your memory anywhere.
Some people have predicted the end of the external hard drive due to the introduction of flash memory storage that most portable hard drives and memory sticks use. Due to the fact they are still the lowest cost random access re-writable storage solution it has not transpired yet. Most at risk from compact flash memory drives are smaller hard drives. Combining the magnetised disks with flash memory capabilities the future lies in hybrid drives, and many companies have already invested in their design.
The external hard drive is here to stay for a little while yet it seems. They will need to find a new incarnation to continue apace with development due to the advance in flash memory portable hard drives and memory sticks. They may well go the way of the floppy disk and tape cassette otherwise.
Thinking of buying an external hard drive for yourself? You should visit Low Price Memory for a full line of affordable external hard drives, computer memory and bluetooth headsets.
Published March 5th, 2009
Filed in Technology