For many computer users, the portable hard drive is one of the most valuable pieces of equipment they can own. From acting as a convenient and reliable backup device to taking your valuable business files on the road with you, a portable external hard drive can be a godsend.

The purpose of a portable hard drive, of course, is to allow the user to carry data easily from place to place. While these types of external hard drives used to be very large and bulky, in addition to being prohibitively expensive to buy, these days external hard drives truly are portable, weighing only a few pounds and easily transported from place to place in a briefcase or laptop bag.

In addition, the storage capacity of these portable external hard drives only continues to grow, and the price only continues to fall. While it used to be hard to find an external portable drive with a high enough capacity to back up an entire desktop computer, these days it is not unusual to find portable drives with capacities running into the hundreds of gigabytes.

Of course there are things to consider beyond the mere storage capacity of the portable external hard drive. If you plan to be moving large quantities of data, or if you plan to use the portable drive for business purposes, it is important to choose the fastest drive you can afford. The speed of the drive will be expressed as average seek time, and it will be measured in milliseconds. The smaller the average seek time the faster the drive should be, and this should reduce the amount of time it takes to copy and retrieve data.

When copying small files or small amounts of data, the difference in seek time may not be apparent, but when hundreds of gigs are being moved around, even a small difference in average seek time can make a huge difference.

How the portable hard drive connects to the computer is an important consideration as well. Most of the leading portable external hard drives will use either USB or firewire connections, and it is important to know the difference. While firewire is faster than standard USB, not all computers will have a firewire port. It is important to look at the specifications of your own PC, or call the manufacturer, to determine which type of external hard drive connection is right for you. Most of the PCs manufactured in the past five years or so will have at least one USB port, so a portable hard drive with a USB connection should fit the majority of PCs in home use today.

If you plan to use your portable external hard drive for backup purposes, it is a good idea to use some sort of backup software to copy data from your hard drive to the external drive. Many operating systems come with their own backup software, and in addition there are plenty of third party backup programs on the market that make it easy and quick to backup your valuable personal data.

When it comes to finding the best external hard drive reviews, there are plenty of places to start the search. There are many reviews out there, covering virtually every model of external hard drive on the market, and if you look around enough chances are you will find plenty of information.

One of the best places to start the search for the best external hard drive reviews is also one of the most original. The many computer magazines on the newsstand, including Computer Shopper, Computer World and others, are great sources of reviews on virtually every kind of laptop equipment, including DVD drives, hard drives, printers and much more. Even in this world of the internet, these paper publications are great sources of information.

Of course that does not mean that the internet is not important, and in fact there are many great external hard drive reviews on the internet as well. These reviews of external hard drives and other equipment run the gamut, from personal opinions posted on personal web sites and blogs, to professionally written reviews prepared especially for online publications.

When reading these external hard drive reviews, it is important to be on the lookout for any possible bias or vested interest on the part of the reviewer. If for instance the web site is selling a particular brand of external hard drive, or linking to an affiliate who sells that brand, there may be a possible conflict of interest to be aware of.

There are of course many sources of information on all kinds of internal hard drives, external hard drives and other computer information. Some of this information will be personal in nature, gathered by talking with friends, family members and coworkers. This kind of first hand experience with laptop equipment can be quite valuable, and it is important to seek it out.

For more objective measures of quality, there are plenty of external hard drive reviews out there waiting to be found. When researching a particular brand or model of hard drive it is a good idea to look at several reviews. Doing so will give you the most complete and most objective look at the various external hard drives on the market today.

These two technologies are competing to be the best way to connect electronics together. They both began as a connection to your PC or Mac, but they have grown to be a form of data transfer between almost any electrical data storage device. See who is the winner in one of the biggest technological races of this century.

USB first showed up on the map to solve the problem of Plug-N-Play devices. Most devices were, at that time, connected to a computer via a serial port. Serial ports were not intended for such a wide application of uses and it is a relatively slow port. What USB set out to do was to create a standardized plug that can be duplicated easily with adapters and hubs. The result was the same standard port you see today. It is much faster now than its original version, but it has remained as unchanged as a wall socket. When it was introduced, you actually create 144 USB ports from just one source by duplicating it with hubs. Of course, the laptop needs to able to handle the software load. USB started popping up on all types of devices from digital cameras to MP3 players. It is now used to even connect devices together with out even using a laptop.

Firewire came about shortly after the release of USB. This severely hurt the spread of its use because USB had quickly become a standard for personal computers. It was developed by Apple and released in 1995 on its G3 Power Mac. Apple had the advantage of being the standard computer in the artistic community, so this was the edge that they had on USB. It took a couple of years, but consumer electronics began using Firewire to appeal to the industry that connected video and sound equipment to their Macs. It was also praised for its speed of data transfer. It was nearly impossible to transfer digitized video via USB because it was too slow. Firewire affected the entertainment industry in such a way it won the 2001 Primetime Emmy Engineering Award.

Which technology is better? With the release of USB 2.0, USB has dominated Firewire and almost made it disappear in the PC industry. Mac still embraces it; even cell phones have USB ports on them. USB is now fast, universal and you can actually charge devices like cell phones and iPods through a USB port. Firewire started out with the speed, but USB has pulled ahead in a dominating way.