Why buy an external hard drive?
You may simply have run out of disk space. Buying an external backup hard drive can solve this problem cheaply and easily. You might be concerned about the loss of data from a catastrophic hard drive failure. If this is the case, read our review of backup software. Those programs can automatically backup your whole hard drive, at preset times.
The types of backup drives
1.High capacity: These hard drives are about the size of a notebook. They have better capacity and performance than portable hard drives and you can play media, like sound and video files, directly off them. When you drop these they break.
2.Portable: These drives are about the size of a deck of cards. They generally use a USB cable for power and data transfer. Dropping a portable drive shouldn’t break it.
3.NAS(Network attached storage): These drives plug into a network just like a PC.
Below we review the top external drive of each type.
A word about cables
You will probably mostly be using a USB cable. These cables come in 2 versions, version 1.1 and 2.0. Version 2 is faster than version 1, but backwardly compatible so you don’t need to worry about it. Firewire is about the speed of a USB 2 cable, but it is more of a MAC solution. eSATA cables are very fast, but unless your PC is new and top of the line, you probably don’t have a port for it. If you want the extra speed you may need to buy a card with a eSATA slot.
These come in 80 to 500 GB sizes. If you just need to backup 10 GB or less then I suggest a portable flash memory stick.
This is a plug and play device, so your PC should pick it up right away. Just like putting a CD in a drive. I tested it with Vista and XP and no problems. It comes with functional but basic backup software. |
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These hard drives come in 320, 500 and 700 GB sizes. They run at 7200 RPM and have a 16 Meg buffer, which as the top end of the scale.
They do suffer from the same problems as all the external hard drives. They come with only basic software and they do sometimes break down. To counter this Seagate gives a lengthy warranty. We recommend you buy backup software separately and don’t keep your only copy of valuable data on any one disk. |
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This is a NAS(Network attached storage). It attaches to your business or home network with a Gigabit ethernet port. It is very fast and quiet, comes in 320, 500 and 750 GB and it works fine with Vista.
It has multiple level security, so you can store sensitive data on there. The drive is suitable for shared files and backups. |
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