External Hard Drives

An external HDD not only give you additional data storage space, it provides you with the option to carry this data with you whenever you need to use a computer other than your own. Ideal for people who often take work home with them from the office.

External Hard Drives have been around for many years but have only really gained popularity since the creation of USB2 and FireWire connections. With these drives being designed to store large amounts of data, earlier connections like SCSI made them fairly expensive and generally restricted them to business and corporate users.

With hard drive capacities increasing at a phenomenal rate, manufacturers are now developing cases allowing you to buy a standard internal hard drive and make your own size of portable storage. Standard size (3.5") hard drives need an external power source to operate but this is supplied with the external case. Mini, or Laptop size (2.5") hard drives take their power from the USB port on the computer and don't need their own power supply. These smaller hard drives are generally smaller in capacity and tend to be slightly more expensive than the standard size hard drives.

A corporate version of an external hard drive that plugs into a network rather than an individual computer is called a Network Access Storage (NAS) device. This allows multiple users to access the same data which can be invaluable if different departments, or even different offices are working on the same project or sharing the same information.