External Hard Drive Buyers Guide

Welcome to my guide on buying external hard drives. Hopefully this guide will allow you to be informed before you make our buying decision. In simple terms an external hard drive does two main things:

1. You can increase your storage capacity
2. Keep safe and as a back up for all your documents, music, videos and photos

They come in many different formats and I will cover these off in this external hard drive guide.

These desk top hard drives are usually quite large and robust and offer a high storage capacity. They have been designed to sit beside or close to your PC. They will plug into your mains electricity and connect to your PC via a USB port. Some of them and in my opinion the better ones automatically do all your downloading and back-ups for you because the software is built in. This is sometimes referred to as auto-synchronization. They typically have run speeds of around 5,400 to 7,200 rpm and this is an indicator of how fast they will download the files on your PC. The bigger this number then the quicker it will download.

You will need to check that the external hard drive will work with your PC's operating system.

Typically these hard drives can store around 1 Tb of information and you can also get them in 2Tb options as well which is simply double the capacity. See the table below to show you what that actually means they will store for your own documents.

These are by far the most popular option as you can easily take them with you no matter where you go. They are much smaller and lighter than a Desktop external hard drive. The other main advantage of these is that they are powered straight from the USB on your PC or laptop so no need for a mains electric power point. It is just simply plug and play by putting the USB lead into your laptop and instantly you will have extra storage and access to all your documents and files.

These usually come in 250Gb storage capacity sizes and then right up to 1Tb size. They can come in a variety of colors and styles and typically have a running speed of around 5,400 rpm which is more than enough. See the table below for what the actual storage allows you to do.

These are the cheapest option and they are easy to carry around and use. They are also the easiest to lose. Be warned I have seen many people lose these or hand them to someone to copy a document and then forget to get them back. They have different storage sizes and come in a whole array of colors and designs. Always check for compatibility with your operating system. They range in size from 2Gb up to 32 Gb depending on what you need.