External Hard Drives

The earliest hard disks were too bulky to fit into the computer itself so by definition, they were the first external hard drives. Nowadays, external hard drives are still available in the market although thankfully, they are now much more portable. External hard drives work in the same way as the hard drive on a PC except that they are connected externally. They also have pretty much the same capacity, with some external hard drives having as much as 500 GB of storage space.

So why bother with external hard drives then? For a time, they were not very popular. After all, there were much more convenient portable storage devices in the market such as floppy disks, USB flash drives, and memory cards.

YHowever, with the advent of the Internet and more complex programs and computer games, there was a need for more storage space. The threats of viruses that could wipe out data stored in internal hard drives also increased exponentially so external back-up files became necessary. External hard drives provide hundreds of gigabytes of space that no current memory card or flash drive can surpass.

Most external hard drives in the market can run on the three major operating systems: Windows, Linux, and Unix. Some of the manufacturers of external hard drives are Toshiba, Dell, Seagate, IBM, Hitachi, Simple Tech, and Freecom.