How Big of an External Hard Drive Do You Need?
An external hard drive can be one of the most useful purchases that you could ever make for your computer. At one time or another, nearly everyone could use more storage. However, there are many different choices available, and how much storage do you really need? The best purchase will depend on your intended use for the drive.
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Document Storage
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A typical Word document with no embedded graphics or charts will be under 100 KB in size. Just 1 GB would be sufficient to hold 10,000 such documents. If you only intend to store documents on your drive, look for the most portable external hard drive that you can find. A USB flash drive may suit your needs better, as you will be able to fit it in your pocket. If your documents are business-related, look for a drive with file encryption; it will help to prevent someone else from viewing your sensitive data should your drive ever be stolen.
Music Storage
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An average MP3 music file encoded in high quality will be around 4 MB in size, so each gigabyte of storage space will be able to hold about 250 songs. If you will be storing music, a high-capacity external drive would be best for your needs. Consider purchasing a 2.5-inch external drive. A drive in this form factor will be very easy to transport if you would like to bring your music with you when you travel, and many 2.5-inch external hard drives do not require power supplies, drawing their power directly from the USB connection. A 500 GB 2.5-inch external hard drive in 2009 will cost approximately $105, and it will hold around 125,000 songs---enough to store the entire collection of nearly any music enthusiast.
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Movie Storage
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A typical movie in the DivX or XviD formats is approximately 750 MB in size, depending on the compression level used. If you intend to store movies, the largest external hard drive that you can afford would be best. A 1000 GB 3.5-inch external hard drive in 2009 costs approximately $100, and it will store around 1,300 movies.
Project Storage
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If you are a graphic artist or music producer, you may be looking for an external hard drive to use for "scratch space," that is storage space for projects that are in progress and haven't been finalized yet. Drives that are used for scratch space do not have to be large in capacity, but do need to be able to write data at very high speeds because of the very large size of some project files. Purchase an external Solid State Drive (SSD) to use for scratch space; SSDs can often write data much more quickly than conventional hard drives. This can be an expensive solution, however. A 64 GB solid state drive in 2009 can cost $200 or more.
Data Protection
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Eventually, all hard drives fail. Generally, a hard drive will last several years, but you should always expect the unexpected when computer hardware is concerned. If you cannot afford to lose the data that you store on your external hard drive, consider purchasing a solution that incorporates RAID, a data redundancy system. An external storage system using RAID will utilize multiple hard drives, devoting part of their storage space to data redundancy. This way, if one of the hard drives should fail, none of your data will be lost; you can simply replace the hard drive and your data will be rebuilt. The Drobo is an excellent multi-drive storage solution, costing $399 in 2009 before any hard drives are added.
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