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Posted on April 1, 2006 by Nick Dorich | Posted under Hardware
Some things to look for in a portable external hard drive
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Since portable external hard drives are often used by those who travel for business, it is also important to consider the weight of the drive. While the weight of the drive may not be critical in and of itself, when combined with the weight of the laptop, the briefcase and all the other items needed on the average business trip, it is obvious that shaving even a few ounces off the weight of the portable hard drive can be important. The storage capacity of the portable external hard drive is perhaps the most important factor for most people. The rule of thumb here is to buy as large a capacity hard drive as you can afford, since the price differential between different sized drives is not as large as it used to be. If you plan to use your external drive to back up your desktop PC, it is important that the external hard drive be at least as large as that on the desktop. Since an external hard drive is by its very nature portable, there are a number of factors to consider beyond the size and speed of the drive. Security is one such feature. If the drive is to be moved from place to place it is important to assign a password of other type of encryption to the data the drive contains, so that it will be useless in the event of a loss or a theft. With so much highly personal and sensitive business information being stored on portable hard drives these days, security is a critical factor. The connection to the PC is another important factor to consider, and there are a number of choices here as well. While the first external hard drives connected to their host computers via slow parallel port connections, the most common connections for the portable external hard drive these days are USB and firewire. While firewire connections are faster than traditional USB, not every PC will have a firewire port, so it is important to look at the specs of your PC before shopping for an external hard drive. About The Author: Nick has been a technical writer of a computer magazine for over 5 years. He has a website where he has collection of his reviews about different computer hardware components. Visit http://www.harddrivematters.com to read about harddrive and other computer components suitable for your computers. |
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