Portable Laptop Hard Drive
Now a day’s digital data can be easily transferred and stored from hard disk drive to any small external hard drive. Before 1990’s the size of the storage drives were very big. The cost of the hard drive was very high. But today we can store thousands of GB in a small size portable external hard drive. The cost of the drive is only few dollars only.
What is Portable External Hard Drive?
The portable hard drive is similar to the hard disk drive inside your desktop computer or laptop computer. The only difference is the portable drive contained in its own case. It can be easily connected directly to your laptop computer using USB data cable. The drive is available in different storage size. You can buy any drive according to your storage need.
What is the purpose of using it?
The external hard disk is mainly used for the data storage purpose. Normally it is used for backup of files and information’s from your laptop/Desktop computer. You can use the data stored in external hard drive for Data recovery or Data cloning. Sometimes the drives are used for running virtual machines.
How to choose the external hard drives?
While choosing portable hard drives for your computers, you should be aware of few things. Choosing the capacity of the hard drive depends on your storage need. High capacity hard drives are needed for large data storage. Usually portable external hard drives are smaller in size and provide USB cable connections.
Pro’s and Con’s of using portable external drives
These drives provide cheap and large data storage area. It is portable and you can easily backup your data quickly using the data cable. The main risk of using the hard drives is they get crashed just like any other hard drives. But the data can be recoverable. Since it is portable one, you cannot store any sensitive information in it. Less security for the information stored in the portable drives.
Cheap Portable USB Hard Drive
Portable USB Hard Drive
Data backup is very important for the digital data users. Hard drives play a vital role in data backup, data recovery and in running virtual machine. Portable hard drives are easy to carry form one place to another and it is easy to connect with the other computers using USB data cable. It is available in many storage capacities, you can choose it, depends on your storage need. It allows the user to move the hard disk form one place to another easily. Few years before these drives are very heavy and large in size but now backup drives becomes very compact and cheap
Today it is easy to carry thousand GB data in a very small pocket size portable hard disk. . Many laptop and netbooks comes with USB port so portable hard disk with USB cable is easy to use anywhere and in any place. With the help of these hard drives, it is possible to run virtual machine using single USB cable connected to the computer. There is no need for separate power connection for this device. The data storage and retrieve is quiet faster than the normal hard disk because of the flash memory. Compact portable HDD are very lightweight and easily fit in to the shirt pocket which holds tons of data into it.
Cheap Portable USB Hard Drive
Portable hard disks are more convenient for business people, office use and for students. Expensive portable HDD are not affordable for everyone. In addition, it is not necessary to spend more money on backup device. So it is better to choose cheap and best drive for performing backup and data retrieve functions. Using portable hard disk, you can backup thousands of digital documents in to a small 250GB portable hard disk. There is no need for CD rack with thousands of CD’s in it. You can simply replace the set of CDs with portable hard disk so that you can get more free space in your shelf and it is easy for you to manage the files using portable external hard disk.
The size of the portable external hard drives becomes more compact and which is capable of storing large amount of data. These flash memories are easy to store and retrieve information. It performs faster when compare to the normal HDD. Spending more money to buy lot of CD’s you can better buy a cheap hard disk and backup your main data from your computer using these portable external HDD’s.
Western Digital My Passport Essential Portable USB Hard Drive
My Passport Essential is one of the cheap portable USB hard drives designed by Western Digital Company. It comes with USB data bus connection and no need for separate power supply. It is lightweight drive can store data up to 250GB. You can replace more than 300 CD’s into a small portable hard disk. It is easy to connect the drive with your computer or laptop with the help of USB cable.
It is easy to install. The main drawback in this product is the pre-installed software is not good. It is better to remove the software and reinstall it with software. Unlike other hard drive, it is very quiet. It is worth for backup and running virtual machine in your computer or notebook. The cost of this drive ranges from 100 USD to 150USD depends on the storage capacity. It is quiet cheap price for 2.5 inch external HDD. You can buy the product in many famous online stores such as amazon.com and also available in many retail showrooms.
Best Solid State External Hard Drive
Solid State External Hard Drive
Now a day’s external hard drives are very common among the portable computer users. Solid State Drives are nothing but the data storage device, which uses semiconductors (NAND gate) to store the data. These external storage units offer high performance. They are more durable because they do not have any moving parts. However, there is a rotating motor is required to rotate the magnetic plate in hard drives.
Benefits of Using SSD Hard Drive
Due to the fast growing computer technology, SSD hard disks are widely used by many users. The costs of solid-state hard drives are costlier than normal hard drives. These drives are more preferable by the professionals and business people because of its advanced technology. There are no moving parts in it and it provides fast data access option make it more effective one among users. Next important advantage is it consumes very low power supply, so it is very useful for portable computers such as notebook computer or Netbook users.
Solid State Drive VS Hard Disk Drive
Both drives store data but the speed, cost, weight of these two differ from each other. Both of them have their own merits and demerits. Hard disk drives (HDD) use magnetic plates to store data, so the cost of the HDD is comparatively very cheap but the data access speed is slow when compare to SSD. If you want to store more than 120GB, there is no option to buy SSD. When speaking about power consumption, it is better to choose SSD, because it needs less power to operate.
Disadvantage of Solid State External Hard Drive
The main drawback of Solid State external hard drive is its high cost. The SSD are made of semiconductors (NANA gate) which cost high. The hard disk drive made of magnetic plates are cheaper when compare to NANA gates. The next disadvantage is you cannot store more than 120GB in SSD. Other than these two main drawbacks, it is effective to buy SSD for your data storage purpose. It will not suite for the people who often store and delete data from the external hard drive, because SSD have limited write cycle.
Best Solid State External Hard Drive
Kingston HyperX Max 128GB Solid State External Hard Drive is one of the best external hard drives. It is expensive but can transfer data very fast using the support of USB3. It is easily portable and an effective drive. It can manage to write 105.8 MB/s and reed 171.4 MB/s. The speed of the drive makes it idle for backup purpose. There is no moving parts makes the drive perfect for portable. The high-speed data transfer makes it the best option to buy.
Cheap External SATA Hard Drives
Latest External SATA Hard Drives
In the fast world, the computer gadgets must be speed and smart to perform many tasks. Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) is a standard used to connect your desktop computer or laptop with any hard disk drive. External SATA or eSATA is an interface used to connect external hard drives to your PC. There are many latest SATA Hard drives available in market.
This connection provides very fast data transfer through the serial bus. Previously PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment) is used as an interface. However, today many PC and notebook computers are replaced from PATA to serial ATA, because this is advanced over PATA in many aspects. PATA connection uses large bulk of cables, which leads to complication during connection.
Serial ATA size of cables are comparatively smaller and provides cleaner cabling compared to PATA setup. We all know that serial data transfer is faster than parallel one. Serial ATA provide fast data transfer rate. It transfers data through high-speed serial data cable.
eSATA Connection For External Hard Drives
Today most connections in our Desktop and laptop computers are migrating from to PATA to SATA standards. Still old model computers have PATA connectors only. Therefore, it is necessary to install a PCI adapter card into the motherboard to establish eSATA connection with your old PC. eSATA cables are used to connect your external hard drive with your PC through eSATA connector.
Once the connection is made using the eSATA connector, the data can be transferred from pc to external hard drive and vice versa. eSATA drives data transfer rate is very faster than USB or FireWire drives. It is advisable to establish the connection when the system is in off state. You may not hot swap the connection. eSATA provide great flexibility in external storage.
Even you can replace your internal system hard drive with external one using eSATA. The Seagate 500GB eSATA hard drive is one of the recent hard disk drive available for consumers with eSATA connector. It can be used to save large volume of data from PC. It can act as backup storage drive. It is still faster than USB and Firewire based hard drives. This product comes with one year warranty.