We have created this website to bring you hands on information on portable external hard drives, that isn’t too technical. Most users don’t want to know about the specific physical data distribution on the discs, but they want to know if the drive works and is up to current standards.
Another thing that we face every day when it comes to buying anything is to find the best prices for it. Most of the time when you go to a store and look at the products, you realize that this isn’t the price that was listed online. Many online stores don’t have to pay high rents at good locations since their storage building can be located anywhere – they save a lot of money in expenses. Many of them don’t pay top dollars for TV ads as they can do their advertising online with a fraction of the cost, so they can give you better prices and a better service. If you are looking for the best price on portable external hard drives, we recommend you browse through our website, as we have done everything possible to find the cheapest prices for the highest quality products. This should be
Do you feel like you are always deleting files from your current hard drive as it is filling up? Is your computers slowing down? These are all problems that can be solved with an external hard drive as they will allow to split both the load and the files so that you will have a faster computer with more space for your valuable files.
Are you taking backups?
If you ever suffered a hard drive crash, you know the amount of work that is required to get it fixed. Almost every time you will lose all your files, and if you are working on your computer you will lose valuable data. The problem is that some work can’t be re-done, and even if you try the results will not be the same as you won’t have the same motivation to do it as you did before.
Take photographers for example – they need tons of disc space as they work with very high resolution images. Some of them do a lot of photo editing, and they are artists at what they do. Once they are done, it is not likely that they can repeat the process identically. What if their hard drive crashes? They all have high speed external hard drives that back up their work frequently – even more than once a day. That way, if the internal drive breaks down, they will have a pretty new backup of their work.
If you are not worried about losing work or you are considering a portable external hard drive for your home computer, you might be pleased about the fact that you can get automatic backups of your computer, and in case something goes wrong, you can just revert your operating system from the backups. This means that you won’t have to re-install every program you had installed, and you won’t have to set up everything like they were before – it will be done automatically from your backups.
How about your family photos? Many of us use external hard drives for photos that we take of our families. We take pictures during important times in our lives, and we look back to them from time to time to remember those good days. Your children growing up, the vacation on which you proposed to your wife, everything important was on that hard drive! Good thing you had a backup on a portable hard drive.
How can an external hard drive speed up my computer?
Many of us have large amounts of data on our hard drives that is constantly accessed. You might say that you don’t, but at the same time you have a huge mp3 music collection which you have playing every time you are at your computer. This causes your hard drive to access the music in between doing everything else you are doing. So basically playing music can be slowing your computer down, but you should not sacrifice on the music. With a portable external hard drive that you have your music on, you can reduce the load on your internal drive, and speed up your computer. The current USB 2.0 and 3.0 technologies are fast enough for this, and you can even find drives that support firewire which is a faster technology on it’s own – we will discuss these technologies in another post.
Extend your storage space with external hard drives
Today you can find portable external hard drives from 500mb, 750mb, 1TB up to 2TB and even more. If you are storing a photo collection with high res photos (like most cameras today) you will need a lot of space and a quick connection – a firewire or an ethernet. Most people don’t realize that the oldest one of the connectors – the ethernet – still is the fastest. There are all kinds of fancy connections available, but if you choose to get an ethernet drive, you will realize that they are a lot faster than anything else.
Apple has a huge market share when it comes to selling personal computers, and that is why there is a demand for specific accessories that both work exceptionally well with OS X computers (Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion for example), but also match the appearance of the computer. That is why portable external hard drives for mac have such a high demand, and we intend to bring you some of the best drives that work well with your mac.
Companies like Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, LaCie, iOmega and Buffalo are making just some of the disks we are going to go through here. It doesn’t matter if you mainly use your computer for games, or if you have important files to back up or store on an external disk to just give your main drive more free space to work more efficiently, you will find the disk that fills your needs for attached storage from our website.
Important things that we will be going through are the rotational speed, which means that speed at which the disc rotates inside the drive. This will contribute to the loading times and the access speed as the faster the disc moves, the quicker the data can be accessed. Usually these drives work at a few standard speeds and if you are looking for high speed disks, you will also find that they are often more expensive. Unless you are connecting with ethernet, most drives will be just fine when it comes to rotational speed as the transfer rate of the connector will be the limiting factor in most cases.
The drives usually work with 5400 rpm, and the connection types can range from USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FIrewire 400 1394a, Firewire 800 (1394b-2002) to eSata and Ethernet. The technologies are listed here from slowest to fastest when it comes to transfer rates. Of course you will have to look at other specifications like the writer heads, rotational speed but these days as we also have SSD Drives you have even more to choose from.
SSD drives are Solid State Drives, which means that they don’t have moving parts. There isn’t a platter that rotates at any speed and there isn’t a writing head. They work like the memory cards that you have in your camera, and because of this they are a lot faster when it comes to accessing the data. This is the top of the line technology, and if you are looking for a fast solution, you might want to look at having something like this set up in your computer system.