Why you should consider buying a portable hard drive
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.