What is an External Hard Drive?

Some people like the usual personal computers, and someone does not know how to do without a compact laptop. In this case, the dispute is useless, because it's the user's preferences, and every argument "for" has its own "against". So the author of this article: for many years I used a personal computer that worked like a clock. If you need to save something - CDs are always at hand; To transfer information to another computer will help the flash drive, but to back up digital photos for the family album to another hard drive, you had to shut down the computer, connect the second SATA hard drive and copy files to it. After that, disconnect it and collect the case of the system unit. In principle, nothing is impossible in this, especially since this operation is not done so often, however, we had to take too many actions, so sometimes it occurred to us that an external hard disk for the USB bus would be very useful. Surely, someone in this situation will know himself.

Knowledgeable people will suggest that the modern SATA standard external hard drive (and motherboard) supports hot-plug Hot-Plug replacement - almost like USB. All right, that's just not clear what the developers thought when they took out the E-SATA connectors on the back of the computer case, which is not easy to get to, especially if it's located in the computer desk.

All this would continue, but one day it was necessary to rewrite part of the information from the backup hard drive to the laptop. Flash drives have not yet compared with the volume of HDD, so it was decided to purchase an external hard disk usb for such purposes. Now, really, laziness is the engine of progress.

What is meant by the term remote hard drive? This is a disk that can be connected to a computer or laptop without disassembly, and through external bus connectors. In fact, it is a direct competitor of compact and convenient USB flash drives. But there is only one "but": the cost of one gigabyte of flash memory volume is several times higher than that of magnetic hard drives. In other words, for the cost of 64 GB flash drive you can buy a full-fledged HDD with a capacity of more than 500 GB. Comments are superfluous.

Obviously, an external hard drive must be connected to USB ports, because it is universal. Indeed, such models exist. The best solution for those who do not want to "reinvent the wheel". It is enough to connect the wire of such a hard drive to the USB port, so that it is recognized by the system. True, some models assume simultaneous connection to two ports to increase power, but this is rather a feature, not a drawback. By the way, you need to consider that any external USB hard drive loses in speed to the SATA standard, although not as significantly as a flash drive. It is possible that the massive introduction of USB 3.0 will change the situation and reduce the speed rupture.

Economical users may be interested in two other options, using which, you can get twice the amount of disk space for the same cost. The first involves the purchase of a SATA-to-USB adapter, through which you can connect the most common hard drive to the USB port. In addition, the adapter supports even the old PATA standard, so you can safely get from the shelves of the hard drive veterans to breathe a second life into them.

The second way is to buy a hard drive for the laptop and a "pocket" for it with the output to the USB interface. Why do we need a model for a laptop? Very simple! It can withstand shaking, and also has a reduced size - what you need for a portable HDD.

To summarize, we can say that a portable hard drive is as necessary as a flash drive. Unless USB flash drives will become cheaper, they will become faster every three and, of course, grow in volume.