About External Hard Drives

Series Summary

An external hard drive is a device that stores data that would otherwise be kept on the hard drive of your desktop or laptop computer. It is usually reserved for large capacity storage of big files that could clog up your internal hard drive. External hard drives are a must for music lovers, artists, photographers, and other people who store large amounts of multimedia information on their computers. With the proliferation of increasingly higher resolution videos and other media that have a wide scale digital distribution, having an external hard drive makes sense; as it is usually a plug and play solution that is much more cost effective and convenient than adding memory to an existing internal hard drive.

External hard drives, and other secondary storage devices, are great for portability; they allow you to take large amounts of data with you wherever you go; thumbdrives and other flash memory devices can fit on your keychain comfortably. They are useful for security reasons as well. They help protect your computer from viruses, because they’re not perennially immersed in the digital stream known as the internet. They can also be used to store sensitive data, restricting access to a certain document to the one person who has the drive in their possession.

In this free online video guide to using external hard drives and other storage devices, learn how to get started connecting the drive and storing your data, whether for regular use or just as a backup. Our expert will walk you through the different types of drives, including USB 2.0 and FireWire. Lessons also include data backup on CD, DVD, zip disc, and floppy disc.

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Zach with Expert Village and today we are going to talk about external storage devices. External storage devices are good if you run out of space on the hard drive on your computer and you don't want to have to deal with taking your computer apart and installing a new hard drive and going through pretty much all the technical mess or having to pay someone to do it for you. External hard drives come in many varieties of sizes from smallest around 20 to 40 megabytes and upwards of 100's of gigabytes. External hard drives are great for backing up your system and in event of system failure or crash, external hard drives can be used to restore your system to its state with relative ease. External hard drives are also great for portability. They can be taken to work. If you want to work at home, they can go back and forth between there and the office and they are great for using as kind of a share drive in situations where you might need to share information with other people. "