What exactly is an external hard drive, and why should you even ponder buying one?

Almost all computers come with a hard drive, this is where your program files get installed, Windows or Mac OS X run from here and so on. If you’ve ever opened Windows Explorer to go to your “C Drive”, then you have played with your hard drive. As this resides inside your computer, it is of course known as an “internal hard drive”. So, what is an external hard drive, and what can it do for you?

In simplest terms, and external hard drive is a hard drive contained in some sort of case and usually connecting to your computer via Universal Serial Bus (USB) or by Firewire.  It can act as a backup to your existing hard drive, additional storage, or can even sometimes be plugged into your network and used as a central storage device.

Now, as for why you would ever need one, well back up is a big one.  With an external drive, you can plug it in, back up your files, and then take it to a different location for safe keeping.  Or, yes, you can leave it attached to the computer, that choice is yours.  It will also allow you to transport a large qunatity of files from one computer to another quickly as you can just take the drive with you and plug it in to the other computer.

One of the main things I use one for is to store my large music collection, and I point my iTunes to that library of files.  This reduces wear and tear on my internal hard drive, and also keeps it from being sluggish for having too many files on it.

Prices on these have dropped so much on these over the years that they are easy to pick up a 500 gb model for $140 or less, and this will be a fast and economical way of adding more file storage to your life.