Which External Hard Drive is Right for You?

External hard drives have been around for quite some time. The first few generations, like their internal counterparts, were cost prohibitive for the average consumer, and were a lot slower than internal hard drives. They were also very large and bulky.

As time went by the cost of internal drives went down, and speed went up. To remain competitive, manufacturers of external drives had to increase the speed and size of the drives, as well as decrease the cost. They’ve done remarkably well in all those categories.

Today, consumers have a wide choice of external hard drives. The most common are:

USB (Universal Serial Bus): The most common type of external hard drive. It is plugged into a computer's USB port. The current standard is USB 2.0, which can have up to 480 Mbps (Megabytes per second) data transfer speed. They can be large (8 x 4 ½ x 1 5/8 inches) with a separate power cable – while the smaller models are small, light weight, and usually measure 0.5 x 3 x 5 inches.

Firewire: Uses an IEEE 1394 interface to plug into the computer. If the computer doesn't have a firewire plug, a separate firewire PCI card must be purchased. These are larger than their USB counterparts, usually measuring 8 x 4 3/8 x 1 1/8 inches. The benefits of these are that they are capable of data transfer speeds of up to 800Mbps. Unlike most of the USB models, these have to have a separate power cable.

NAS (Network Attached Storage): This type of hard drive can be plugged directly into a wireless or hardwired router or hub. What this means is that if you have a home network set up, you can allow every computer on your network to see and use this device like a hard drive connected directly to the computer. Unlike most network drives, you can use several of these without a bottleneck effect. (Bottlenecking is when there's a limited amount of bandwidth, and more is going into and out of it than it can handle.)

Within the above three choices you, the consumer, can decide if an external hard drive is for you. In order to do this, decide what you need it to do.

Do you just want another storage device to hook to a single computer?

If you plan to leave the unit stationary for the most part, but are only using it to hook up to one to two computers, the USB is the most inexpensive choice. If the drive will only be used on a single computer, buy one of the larger USB models. Pocket drives are easy to loose and damage.

Do you plan to use it to install high speed programs?

Programs with a lot of space and speed requirements, such as high resolution graphics video games, the firewire option is for you. It can transmit data between the drive and computer at high speeds, and won’t lag down the response time of the computer. The drive and memory mapping for firewire drives are done in the hardware instead of tasking the PC’s processor or memory.

Do you have a home network where you’d like to backup the various systems?

The NAS drive is for people who run a home network, but don’t have the time to go around individually backing up the systems. You can also store music, picture, and files which are accessible from any computer on the network. If you’re worried about someone on your home network tampering with the files, you can set the access restrictions (read and write capabilities) of each computer.

New NAS drives also have no IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. For an outside hacker to access them, they’d have to go through the router or hub’s firewall, your computer’s firewall and security, and then try to gain access from there.

With these in mind, start shopping around. The internet is invaluable in this. Locally, a 500 GB (Gigabyte) USB hard drive might cost 200.00 USD or more, while online they can be found for under 60.00 USD plus shipping.