What is an
External Hard Drive?
The external hard drive is a box that sits outside of your computer case. The box is also called either an enclosure or a case. It connects to your computer through a common external hard drive interface such as USB, FireWire, eSATA, SCSI, or the ethernet network. Some units even give you a choice two interfaces such USB or FireWire.
All sizes of drives can be made into external hard drives. Small 2.5-inch laptop hard drives can be placed into small external enclosures that get their power directly from the USB cable. The larger 3.5-inch desktop drives need an enclosure with a separate power supply.
Ways to Use your External Hard Drive
External Hard Drive Enclosures
If you already have a spare IDE, SCSI, or SATA internal disk, you can build your own cheap external hard drive by buying an enclosure kit that converts the disk into an external drive. The internal drive is installed inside the case. Be sure that the case internal interface matches that of your drive.
Most hard drive manufactuers also sell the external disk enclosures with a hard drive already inside. They can come preformatted with the file system of your choice. If you want an external hard drive for Windows XP or Vista, get a drive that is formatted for NTFS. If you want your drive to be read by both a MacIntosh and a Windows system, then get an external hard drive that has been formatted as FAT32.
One particularly nice external drive is the Maxtor OneTouch (now owned by Seagate). With the OneTouch hard drive, you can start a system backup just by pressing the big button on the front of the external hard drive.
USB External Hard Drive Interface
The USB hard drive is the most common external hard drive interface for personal computers. Many other types of devices such as the mouse, keyboard, and printer may also use this interface. Be sure that you have USB 2.0 because you'll find that USB 1.x is much too slow. This interface is best and cheapest choice for connecting an external disk.
FireWire External Hard Drive Interface
FireWire currently has two standards: 400 and 800. The 400 speed is slightly slower than USB 2.0 and the 800 speed twice as fast. This interface is mostly used for video devices but you can also obtain FireWire enclosures for the hard drive.
External SATA (eSATA) Hard Drive Interface
This is a good choice for a high-speed external disk if you don’t want to pay the cost to move up to SCSI.
SCSI External Hard Drive Interface
The SCSI Bus Interface was standardized in 1986. It was the primary external interface on the Apple Macintosh for many years, but it is not in widespread use on the PC. SCSI disks are fast and reliable but they are not usually used on desktop PCs because of their high cost.
Portable Hard Drive Travel Case
Do you carry your external hard drive around alot? If so, be careful not to drop or bump the drive. Hard drives are sensitive mechanical devices that can easily be damaged by shocks and high humidity. Protect your valuable data by getting a travel case for your portable hard drive.
Bluetooth Hard Drive Interface
The bluetooth external hard drive has not caught on because the interface is too slow for transferring the kind of data you would want to put on a hard drive. The bluetooth hard drive interface is much slower than even USB 1.x. Toshiba introduced a 5GB bluetooth external hard drive but it was never much more than a curiosity.
Other External Hard Drives
The Xbox 360 hard drive is is an external drive that attaches to the side of the Xbox console.
The PS3 hard drive fits into an internal slot but it is easy to replace. In addition, PS3 also provides USB ports to connect external hard drives.
Buying Tips
How to find cheap hard drives.
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