What to Look for in an External Hard Drive

Your personal digital data goes on increasing exponentially with time. There is an ever-increasing amount of data in the form of thousands of songs, movies, photos and other personal documents, that need to be stored safely. Naturally, you eventually run out of hard drive space on your desktop or laptop computer. The obvious solution to this problem of data storage shortage is the purchase of an external hard drive. Pen drives or USB flash drives do offer some gigabytes of space, but they are certainly not built for permanent storage. External hard drives now offer terabytes of space, which can easily accommodate the entire totality of your digital data. This Buzzle article is a external hard drive shopping guide in a nutshell.

Why go for an external hard drive? I can guarantee you that there are more reasons for why you should, that severely outnumber the reasons why you shouldn't. One of the prime reasons is portability offered by the drives, which makes data transfer between various terminals easier. They are the best backup solutions to protect your personal data. They can free up the internal hard drive space of your computer.

What to Look For When Buying an External Hard Drive?

Having used external hard drives of my own for some years now, I am in a position to share some tips on choosing external hard drives. Some of the best external hard drive brands are Maxtor, Seagate, Iomega, Lacie and Western Digital. Here are the most important features that you must check out when buying an external hard drive.

Storage Capacity
How much storage space does it offer? That's the first question you must ask. The storage capacities range from a few gigabytes (GB) to terabytes (TB). A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. A general rule is to go for thrice as much as the storage capacity you need. For example, if you think 250 GB of extra hard drive space would be enough, go for more an external hard drive which offers 750 GB of storage space or more. Trust me, when I say that you are always going to need more, no matter how much you start with. Large capacity drives in terabytes tend to be bulky compared to ones offering storage space, which is less than 1 GB. For desktop computers, hard drives with storage space in multiples of a terabytes are available.

Disk RPM
The second most important factor that you should consider is the disk rotation speed, specified in RPM (rotations per minute). A greater speed ensures faster data reading and writing capability. Any drive which offers disk rotation speed in equal to or in excess of 7200 RPM is a good choice.

Cache Memory Size
Every external hard drive has a buffer or cache memory, where it temporarily stores data before transferring it permanently to the disk. Drives with a larger cache size transfer data faster compared to the ones with smaller cache sizes. So look for a drive which has a cache or buffer, which is equal to or larger than 16 MB. Check out the specifications provided in external hard drive reviews to know about the cache size and other features.

Data Transfer Interface
Other than the above factors, another important feature is the type of data transfer interface used by the drive. The most common one is USB 2.0. However, greater speed is offered by FireWire 800 and eSATA interfaces. If you are looking for a drive capable of high data transfer speeds, go for eSATA external hard drives, if your computer has eSATA ports to connect with. You could also wait for the USB 3.0 based drives to be released shortly, which will offer data transfer speeds comparable to eSATA.

It is always good to opt for thrice the amount of storage space you need right now, as eventually it will be required. If there are no budget constraints, I suggest that you go for external hard drives which offer terabytes of space, which can easily accommodate all of your data and still leave a lot more space for new data to be added in the future.