How to Choose an External Hard Drive for Backup

An external hard drive is recommended if it is used primarily to store backups, transport data to another PC or secure important data. An external hard drive also provides you with additional free space to store and run other important programs and files. Here is how to choose an external hard drive for your backup needs.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Files that require backing up
• Internet access

1. Determine the quantity and size of the files you need to backup. Files that have graphics, sound and videos require more space.

2. Find out the space required by your existing programs and applications, as well as shared files and folders. You need to make sure that your hard disk has at least 50 percent free space. This will give you an estimate if you need to replace your existing hard drive. Remember, a 40 gigabyte (GB) hard drive should normally not have more than 20 GB of data stored on it either by programs or files in total.

3. Assess your backup needs. If you save work often that is ready to be archived, an external hard drive works perfectly for you. You can keep adding the archived files in the external hard drive and continue to free up your computer’s internal hard drive space.

4. Compare external hard drives based on the form factor. The size of the hard drive is a good indication of its capacity, performance and mobility. If the external hard drive is larger in size, it has higher capacity, better performance but ranks lower in the mobility factor. Choose the right type of external hard drive based on your requirements.

5. Decide on your budget for an external backup drive. You can choose to buy an external drive of 20 GB, 40 GB, 80 GB or even 100 GB. Depending on the money you can spend and the storage capacity needed, choose your options.

6. Select a stable and durable brand.

7. Go for a drive that has easy setup options and one that is compatible with your existing system configuration. Choose USB 2.0 port hard drives.

8. Check the warranty on the drive.

Tips & Warnings

• Choose the right size of external hard drive. For example, a three and a half-inch external hard drive provides extremely large capacities and high performance, but it may not be your best choice for travel. If you need to transport data, choose a smaller, one-inch drive which is excellent for travel but has limited storage capacity. If you need to transport data very short distances, choose the heavier, three and a half-inch external hard drive.
• Select the data to be backed up. Financial files or any data files that you have created are important and should be backed up. Partition the existing internal hard drive and store all 'to be archived' data in it before transferring it to the external hard drive.

[ianmoore111]

on 4/6/2009 they may make tera bite externals now so i dont know how old this article is

[ltftech]

on 8/14/2008 (1) Physical size is NOT an indicator of performance or capacity. (2) Why on earth do you need to keep half of your computer hard drive space free? Some space needs to be free, but not 50%. (3) I don't know what one-inch drives were readily available to consumers at the time this article was written.