Why Use an External Hard Drive?

External hard drives are a common feature on home and business computers when storage needs increase. These drives may be more expensive than a correspondingly sized internal drive because of the additional hardware required to support the drive.

Function

An external hard drive's function is to provide extra capacity for data, audio, image and video files when a computer's storage capacity grows beyond the available internal disks. It also functions as a portable backup device.

Size

Early external hard drives for PCs were five megabytes in capacity, quite large, required an external power source and were extremely slow. By 2009, a terabyte-sized external disk with a USB connection appeared on the market.

Benefits

Replacing an internal hard drive with a larger one may be troublesome since it involves changing connections inside the computer as well as transferring data from the old drive. An external drive avoids these problems.

Considerations

Because data does proliferate and computer software continues to increase in size, buying the largest size external hard drive available is preferable to compromising on a smaller solution.

Warning

The portable nature of external hard drives raises a security concern since they are easy to steal. Strong data encryption software is advisable for personal or critical information stored on these drives.

References

• History of the Hard Drive
• One Terabyte Hard Drive Comparisons

Resources

• Backup Your Information with an External Storage Device