Choosing The Right Drive
Deciding to buy a hard drive is not a difficult decision. Like moving house when the family grows, you normally need more disk space because of your expanding needs. Deciding on which type of storage device you need is a more difficult choice.
Internal Disk Drives Vs External Disk Drives
If you have a portable computer such as a laptop, notebook, iBook, MacBook, Mac Mini etc and you have run out of disk space, the choice is fairly straightforward. You can either upgrade your internal hard drive, or you could buy an external hard disk. An external disk is so extremely to install, and you don't have to re-install your entire system, which is why this is such a popular choice.
If you have a desktop, tower, G3, G4, G5, Mac Tower, etc then you can either open the computer and install another internal hard drive, or again, simply plug in an external disk and the extra capacity is instantly available. For ease, speed and downright simplicity we would advise you to get an external hard drive. What's more, you can share the data that is on the external disk between computers, between home and office, or lock away the disk at night, securing your computer's valuable data, but still having the computer available.
Types of External Hard Drives
While there may seem to be a plethora of external disk drives available, all providing similar features, it's quite simple to whittle down the choices so that you can concentrate on a few that will do the job. We have summarised the main product differences in order to give you a clear overview of what's available.
Disk drives are categorised by capacity, physical size, and disk performance.
Mobile Drives: These usually don't need mains power, are small enough to fit into a shirt or trouser pocket and are very portable. The trade-off is that their performance is not as good as a desktop drive and the prices per gigabyte are higher than that of a desktop drive.
Desktop Drives: The physically bigger hard disks provide greater storage capacity, better performance and lower prices per gigabyte than the smaller mobile disk drives. The desktop disks require mains power, but are still small enough to carry with you, albeit with more cables than the mobile devices.
Once you have found the type of unit you want, you must decide on the capacity you require. Ask yourself what it is that you want to store on your external hard disk. If you make a full copy of your computer's hard disk, will you still have sufficient space for your music collection? What about all your photos and what about your future data storage requirements?
Price In Relation To Capacity
Typically with external desktop data storage products, the prices only go up slightly, while the capacities double! With the mobile units the jump is not quite so dramatic, however you should take a good look at the capacities and prices before ordering.
We are often asked by customers if a certain capacity hard drive will work on their computer. In 99% of cases, as long as you select the right connection (USB, FireWire, SATA, etc), and your computer runs Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Mac OSX and above, then the capacity doesn't matter.
Specialist Storage Products
You've now decided upon a capacity of hard drive, but may be wondering what One Touch Backup, removable bay and high capacity storage all means.
These specialised storage products fit more specific data storage applications, yet they are essentially external hard drives, which means they will work in all of the areas that a 'standard' external hard disk would. For example, the One Touch Backup product is a great unit which you can 'program' to back up certain data files. When you want to back them up, just press the button, hence One Touch!