Great & Important Reasons To Buy An External Hard Drive Especially To Protect Your Precious Personal Data

Why buy an external hard drive? What are the benefits? Why should I not buy something else? Are they priced appropriately?

All these are great questions to ask, especially when purchasing new computer hardware. So why do I recommend purchasing an external over other just as good items of hardware that perform a similar function? Read on to find out more.

I have ten great reasons why one should buy an external device over other forms of storage. Don't get me wrong, other types of storage have their place and certainly their benefits, but as an overall great device, external is the way to go, here's why;

• Portability - External hard drives are a little larger than their smaller cousins - Portable drives, yet they most often come with a stand to keep them stable and placed in the right position, quite difficult to knock over or stand on or accidentally push off a desk. You can still quite handily port around the drive to other computers in the home or even with your friends.

• Ease Of Use - These devices are literally plug and play, for computers running 32 or 64 bit Windows XP / Vista or 7, you unpack the drive, mount it on your desktop, connect the power cord (if it comes with one) into a power supply and plug the USB cable into an available USB slot on your computer. Windows installs the drive automatically and assigns a new drive letter in My Computer usually F:\ (unless you have other internal or other drives, then the next available letter is assigned)

• Massive storage - 320 Gigabytes, 640 Gigabytes, 1 Terabyte, 1.5 Terabytes and 2 Terabytes are the norm currently for External Hard drives. Is this enough storage? Here is a quick guide to give you an idea, 1 terabyte is enough for

1. - 90 million text emails
2. - 35 million Word Documents without internal pictures
3. - 750,000 photo's in JPEG format
4. - 250,000 3 minute MP3 music tracks
5. - 250 DVD quality movies of 90 minute length

• Connectivity - Very simple using USB 2.0, and in the not too distant future USB 3.0 will become the norm. Also, devices that are USB 3.0 certified will be USB 2.0 compatible. USB 2.0 speeds transfer data at 480 Megabits per second and USB 3.0 speeds transfer data at 6.25 Gigabits per second which equates to downloading a Blu ray movie in 10 minutes.
• Externally Powered - Most of these drives may actually have 2 drives (500 Gigabytes in RAID format, but you see it as one drive) which is helpful as USB can become a little flaky with powering external devices, this is usually fine for mice, keyboards, headphones, video cameras, etc, yet hard drives are slightly more power hungry and if they don't get enough juice, they may fail quicker in the medium term. USB has to power AND transfer data as well
• Backup Potential - You can save ALL your precious data on the one drive, ensuring a suitable backup plan if your computer decides it doesn't want to play anymore. You can either use backup software in tandem with your external drive, or specifically choose which data you wish to keep.
• Portable Media Device - Did you know that if you have the right HDTV, you can also use external hard drives as a media centre? Or you can save your home movies or a photo slide show on the drive and watch them on your HDTV or projector. Just add popcorn.
• Larger Capacity than other hardware - how many USB thumb drives, blank CD/DVD or Blu Ray discs would you need to store ALL of your internal drives data ?
• Potentially virus free, almost all anti- virus and anti-malware can be used to scan your external drive, but if one is found on your internal drive, you can safely remove your external to ensure it doesn't get hit by some nasty bug!
• Cost Effective Business storage - Small to medium enterprises can easily connect these devices to their business networks as an additional storage/archive medium to help ensure the integrity of continued business operation. Or even as additional backup for critical business data, even using a drive at home as a form of 'online storage' over a VPN.
  

As I have provided a top ten reasons of why one should buy an external hard drive, take a look at the right and decide on the most appropriate size for your needs, will it be the 500GB? 1 TB? 1.5 or 2GB? The decision is based solely on your particular needs, 500Gb is a great start even for a laptop/netbook user, since as a complete backup drive, 500Gb is larger than most internal drives. If it is smaller, choose a larger drive.

Another reason to choose a larger drive is to future proof for your growth of data, if you are a media mogul making those funky movies, your going to need MASSIVE amounts of storage for your next Hollywood Blockbuster.

Not a Windows User? Thats Ok, all of these drives are also compatible with your Mac computer

Speaking to friends, and comments I have been seeing recently in some forums I frequent, I have noticed alot of computer users being hit severely with browser hijackers or some really nasty malware. This has created a process that the computer has become totally unusable since maintenance and removal did not happen in a sufficient time frame.

Do I blame the user? No, malware thrives in people not understanding what happens when their computer becomes infected. It's the same analogy when you have car trouble, I don't know what the heck is wrong, but I take it to a mechanic. Unfortunately, people do not see the same with computers.

Having an external hard drive keeping all your work on that device helps to ensure you have at least some safeguard to keeping those files and having them NOT INFECTED. As malware and virus' tend to infect a primary computer and not often on external drives, IF you find yourself in a scenario spending money getting your computer fixed to operating NORMALLY again, then at least ALL YOUR HARD WORK, your photos, your emails, your music, your videos, your documents are STORED ELSEWHERE and relatively safe.