Thread: Purchasing An External Hard Drive

Buy A Brand

Do yourself a huge favor and buy a stigma name that you easily recognize. Sure these may cost a little more than brand x but with PC accessories like this you really do get what you pay for. If a Maxtor 100GB external drive costs $200 and another brand x 100GB drive costs $80 why do you think that is? Because the company likes you? Because they like arriving at smaller profits? No it's because it's a cheaper drive made with inferior parts that's going to break a lot earlier than you might expect.

Google It

Whatever brand or model you determine on create sure you do some research before purchasing. Always, always Google the exact brand and model of the drive you're debating buying. Look for reviews and especially any feedback on how reliable a drive is. You'll be very surprised to find that some posses have particularly bad reputations in terms of equipment reliability and what's known as the "click of death" in the outside hard drive industry.

Spend time in Google arresting out your prospective purchase. You'll be glad that you did.

Connectivity

When it comes to extraneous hard drives you'll need to choose carefully when selecting your connection types. Your external hard drive will support either USB or Firewire. Firewire is the fastest selection available at the moment but your computer may not support this. The vast bulk of modern PC will, however, feature a USB port.
The next doubt now is what type of USB port do you have - USB 1.0 or 2.0? If your computer only has a USB 1.0 port then your extraneous hard drive is going to transfer data VERY slowly. USB 2.0 is the minimum you should study as connection options for both your computer and your external hard drive. If you don't have a USB 2.0 port (also called HiSpeed USB) on your PC you may need to get a USB 2.0 card fitted.

Speed

Now of grade we need to talk about speed. The faster your hard drive controls the faster data will get shifted to your computer and vice versa. Without boggling you with comptuer jargon there's a couple of technical matters you need to include on your shopping list.