Internal Vs External Hard Drive

The 21st century has seen an explosion of digital data, as electronic devices of all kinds ranging from camcorders, cameras and laptop computers have found widespread use. Naturally, storage devices with large capacities, are a need of the day. Hard drives are the standard magnetic storage devices used in computers for data storage. No matter how much hard drive space you start with, you are surely going to run out of it in the near future.

Your aggregated store of photos, music, videos and movies is only going to expand with time and you are going to reach a point where, buying extra storage is not an option, but a necessity. A desktop computer user has two ways of expanding hard drive memory. Either he can opt for an extra internal hard drive or go for an external hard drive.

Difference Between Internal and External Hard Drives

There are many aspects that need to be taken into consideration when choosing a new hard drive, but before that you must decide which among an internal and external hard drive do you want to opt for. Here are the differences between the two, outlined according to features.

Access Speed & Data Transfer Rate
Two factors which need to be compared are the access speeds and data transfer rates of internal and external hard drives. The data transfer speed offered by internal hard drives with latest SATA interfaces, amounts to several megabytes per second. In terms of access speed, internal hard drives no longer have an edge as the SATA interface speeds have been matched by eSATA and FireWire.

External hard drives need an interface like USB and FireWire which can offer data transfer speeds comparable to internal SATA interface speeds today. The newly introduced eSATA interface in external drives does indeed offer comparable data transfer speeds. The latest FireWire 800 based hard drives also offer up to 800 Mbit per second of data transfer speed. So in terms of these two aspects related to data access, both internal and external hard drives are on par.

Portability & Cost
The aspect where external hard drives win over internal ones is portability. For users who need to carry around their data or back it up regularly, external hard drives are the best choice. Opt for such a drive with high disk rotation speed and high memory cache size which can provide you with high speed performance. With the USB and FireWire interfaces, you can easily plug and play and external hard drive on any computer, to access on board data. On the other hand, transferring an internal hard drive can be cumbersome.

In terms of cost, internal hard drives definitely cost lesser compared to external drives. You have to pay an extra price for portability. If you are looking for extra space at low cost, go for an internal hard drive, but if price is not an issue, go for an external hard drive. If you are looking for portability and need to transfer data between different machine frequently or you need a data backup solution, again the portable external drive is the best choice.

If you are looking for high data access speed and plan to use the hard drive as part of your gaming computer, its best you go for the latest SATA internal hard drives. One of the latest innovations which are fast leaving traditional electromechanical hard drives behind are solid-state drives, which are based on NAND based flash memory. Though they are expensive compared to hard drives, they outperform the traditional drives in every department. So if you are not short on Vitamin M, I suggest that you go for an SSD based internal or external hard drive which provides true value for money!