How to Buy an External Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"You know most people sometime in their computing life end up losing a lot of their data from a virus or hardware problems. Hardly anyone backs up their data to an external hard drive. Now my name is James MacGregor from InterConnection and I'm going to show you how to buy that external hard drive. This right here is not an external hard drive. However, your external hard drive will have an internal hard drive. All an external hard drive is is a hard drive like this with a case that will allows you to connect a cable like this from here to your computer. First step I would recommend is you got to find out what type of connector you need. Now most new hard drives, external ones, are going to have couple different types of connectors. They'll have a USB one, a fire-wire one, and usually they probably have something on the back that will connect to your computer, but you do want to verify, make sure that it does have the right connector. Second factor is size, how much size do you really need. What I would recommend look at how much stuff you have on your hard drive. Look at all those files you couldn't bear to lose, see how big they are. You can highlight them all, right-click, and go properties and it'll show you the size. Once you have that size you might want to add say 25 percent or maybe even 50 percent for growth. And once you have that number that's probably how big you want to go for your hard drive. If you need a little more space then you go that route. You can never go too big, but you can go too small. So it's one thing you want to keep in mind. And also if you don't want to pay for more hard drive then you're going to need. Finally you want to take a look at the interface. Some of these hard drives will have buttons on them to back up all your data where you install that companies software, plug in the drive, push a button it just backs everything up. Some don't and you have to set up through Windows or your own software. Might want to look into that too when you're deciding what you want. Do you want the ease of the button or can you just set it up in Windows and save yourself a few dollars on the hard drive. My name is James and I just showed you how to buy a hard drive."