External Hard Drives For Computers

Jul 29th, 10 / 0 Comments /

Modern computers are, in general, incredibly resilient and reliable but they can go wrong and when they do you will be very pleased you bought an external hard drive and backed up all your important computer files and folders.

Computers tend to go on working for years even when clogged up with dust drawn inside the case by cooling fans and with keyboards clogged up with more dirt and debris than we would wish to know about. They may be left on for hours every day or even constantly left on with their fans spinning and their hard drives purring away constantly.
It is astonishing that the reading head leap across the disk surface at speeds we can only imagine and hard disk platters can spin at high speeds for hour upon hour with no maintenence or attention and they continue to operate reliably for years.

The manufacturers have done a great job but even the best hard drive will fail eventually and if that time comes suddenly and unexpectedly you need to have backups of all your important files and folders stored in a secure and readily available way.

The simplest way to make backups is to plug an external hard drive into your computer and copy your important files across. Modern hard drives are quiet and compact so an external hard drive enclosure will most likely be about the size of a paperback book. They usually have an exerna; power supply that you plug into the mains and a lead to connect to your computer. Once connected your computer will just see the external drive as an additional hard drive on your computer and you can either manually copy files across to it or set up backup software that automatically copies the files you have selected and ensures they are kept up to date.

External hard drives also make it easy to transfer files and information to another computer or you can simply take an external drive containing your important files and programs when you travel and use the external drive from any other computer you plug it into.

The storage capacity of external hard drives continues to grow while prices continue to reduce or stay the same even while the capacity increases. You can now get an external hard disk with around 2 Terabytes of storage for around £100 or so and that should be able to store everything you are ever likely to need though most people would struggle to fill a 500 Gigabyte disk.

The speed of the hard disk inside the external case is not likely to be a limiting factor as the speed is usually limited by the cable and connection but as a general rule, faster is better.

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