One of the most remarkable features of these external hard drives is how portable they truly are. Even the very largest ones (in terms of storage capacity) will still rest on the palm of your hand and often weigh under three pounds. They are smaller than most paperback books. Gone (or going quickly) are the days of huge metal boxes for external drives. Not only are these things amazingly small, but they are quite attractive, as the illustrations at the top of this page indicate. They come in black, silver, red, blue, and other colors as well.

So it’s very easy to take a portable external hard drive from one location to another. Have some things on your desktop and others on your laptop? Move them wherever you want them.

Working at home after putting in a full day at the office? Take all the files you might need along with you on the drive.

Want to show your home videos to family members at a get-together? Take the drive along, assuming your cousin has a computer that isn’t an antique.

One such use that has become popular is among musicians. They can put their latest mp3 files onto such a drive and easily take it to a party for others to listen to on the spot.

These drives provide very inexpensive storage, and they also make it easier to keep your computer’s hard drive from becoming overloaded. Computers run best with a good amount of open space on their hard drives, so if you copied a lot of things over to the portable hard drive, you might notice an increase in performance on the computer.

Of course, it’s always best to have more than one copy of any file that you care about. Even though these drives are very secure, things do happen at times. It’s good to know that USB drive data recovery software does exist, but best if you never need it. Better to have two external drives in order to copy anything you are going to keep permanently on one!

Generally speaking, all USB external hard drives will be slower in the transfer than if you were working with, say, two internal drives in your computer. Firewire is another technology that is faster than USB but less widely known and used.

Portable external hard drives are becoming better and more affordable all the time. That’s partly because they make the security of backup much simpler to keep up with. It’s also because they enhance our lives, as we do our work in the most expeditious way and we can share our creativity with others more easily.

Check out this selection of portable external hard drives at Amazon!

They have several product lines of external hard drives, with most if not all of their drives coming in a selection of storage sizes.

One such line is called the eGo. Amusing name.

For example, the Iomega 34323 USB 2.0 eGo Rugged Portable Hard Drive
comes in 250gb, 320gb, and 500gb. For colors, you have your choice of black, red, silver, and brown. These computers have Drop Guard™ which is said to protect your drive if dropped more than four feet. The solid steel case is part of the protection.

Other eGo drives are the Helium, the Leather, and more, each with slightly different features. Hot plug-and-play is on most if not all of them, an excellent time saver.

For the maximum security for your business data, the Iomega eGo Encrypt Portable Hard Drive for the PC is protected against accidental drops of up to seven feet, plus it contains hardware-based encryption which comes with a management utility. It’s password protected and locks automatically when the USB cable is unplugged. Like many of the other Iomega external hard drives, it doesn’t need its own power supply.

All of their external drives are quite stylish in appearance and many are targeted for professionals using Macs for photography, video, and music. This means that Iomega strives for reliability and top performance. Judging by the reviews I read, most people feel that they succeeded.

IOmega offers the Prestige portable hard drive in at least two models. The smaller one weighs less than half a pound and fits in a shirt pocket. It is designed for rugged use, including backpacking. It runs on Mac OS X and on Windows from XP on. Surprisingly for a unit capable of holding 640gb of data, it requires no external power supply.

My business has had an Iomega external hard drive for several years now. It has been completely reliable.

See an Iomega external hard drive selection at Amazon.

These hard drives are surprisingly small, smaller than most paperback books, and they only weigh two or three pounds typically. The “USB” refers to the way the external drive is connected to the computer. Computers have ports on them called USB ports, and you connect the drive and the computer with a USB cable. Typically when you buy such a drive, the needed cable comes with it.

80gb refers to the amount of data that you can store on the drive. Unless you have a large number of mp3 music files or video files, it should be adequate for everyday home needs. Another case where you might want a larger drive is if you take numbers of high-resolution photographs. It’s amazing how little space text files and spreadsheet files take up compared with image and music files.

In choosing which 80gb external hard drive to get, pick one where it’s called “plug and play” somewhere in the description. This is a feature that many brands have, but not all. It simply means that you can plug the drive right into any computer and the files will show up in the computer’s list of drives and files. If you don’t have this feature, a particular software driver for the drive you buy has to be installed on the computer. That’s not difficult but better to avoid it, especially if you might be sharing anything on your external drive with family members or friends, on their computers.

Also select a brand that you have heard of. This is easy to do because you can find a wide selection at online stores like Amazon.com or in your community at large stores. The reason to choose a name brand is that it is likely to be better made and thus more reliable than some cheap copy.

Once you have it, get in the habit of using your drive. It may come with a program you can use to copy files, or you can simply copy in the usual way you copy files on your computer: by selecting one or more files, choosing Copy (this will vary between Windows and Mac as to exactly how to do it) and then putting your mouse cursor into the external drive in Windows Explorer or the Mac equivalent, and choosing to paste. Don’t be surprised if it takes a while to make the copy.

How often should you back up? You should back up every time there is something new on your computer that you want to be sure you don’t lose. For writers, this could be just about every day. If it’s less often, fine. You might want to write on your calendar when you have backed up, so you can keep track easily.

So if an 80gb external hard drive suits your needs, do get one and use it!

They provide one of the best ways, if not the very best way to back up whatever is important to you on your hard drive. They are a great way to move files between office and home. You can keep large or numerous files such as photo, music, and video files on the external drives without filling up the computer’s hard drive and quite possibly slowing it down. (If you do this, though, be sure to back up any of the important files to something else too. You always want at least two copies of the important stuff, to thwart Murphy’s Law that if anything can go wrong it will.)

We would all like to think that our computers won’t crash but the sad reality is that they could. Having data backed up is important for whatever projects you are involved with. While businesses typically do have backup schedules, far too many home users have never backed up anything… and even businesses can be lax about keeping current with their backups. Another way that backing up data files can be valuable is if a virus or other malware infects a computer, then it can be repaired without losing the data.

USB external hard drives are one of several ways to back up data. They are arguably the best. CDs and DVDs are much slower to copy to, and not as good for the environment since you keep needing to buy more, use them, and throw the old ones out. (Be sure to scratch them up a lot before throwing them out if you have anything private on them.) Small USB flash drives don’t hold much and are easy to lose. Online backup services can be a good solution at times. Our business tried two such services but we had problems with both. Since we switched to using the external drives, we back up much more regularly and easily. We use three USB drives. One is mostly archival now. We rotate the other two between office and home. By the way, you can password protect folders on these drives if you want to. There are many software programs that do this.

These drives are very portable and lightweight, weighing two or three pounds. They are smaller than most paperback books. They come in different colors, which is convenient for rotating them. We’ve often said “Where’s the red drive?” and our rotation calendar, on a dry erase board, notes something like “John bring black drive from home.”

It is easy to use USB external hard drives. Usually, you simply plug them into a USB port on your computer and the drive will appear as another drive on the computer. This plug-and-play feature does not exist on all drives, though. Some manufacturers require that you install drivers before they will work. This is not hard to do, but avoid it if you expect to be sharing the contents of your drive with friends, relatives, or co-workers. Any drive described as “plug and play” is easiest to share with others.

It’s not difficult to take good care of these drives. Do detach them from the computer when you are not using them. Keep them in a convenient location (so you will use them) but in one where they aren’t going to get dusty or wet. If you have cats near your computer, be sure that the external hard drive isn’t where cat hair collects. Keep them out of direct sunlight… the drives, not the cats! With all this, the drives should last well — two of our three drives are quite a few years old now — and it is comforting to know if there should be any degraded data on such a drive, USB data recovery software does exist.

In using your drive, expect that the backups will take a while, possibly  longer than you expected. This has to do with the speed at which the data goes through the USB ports. There is another technology for connecting external drives to computers, called Firewire, which is faster but much less widely used.

In sum, USB external hard drives have saved a lot of people a lot of time, money, and frustration! Choose one from a brand that you have heard of, from a reputable dealer, and get those files backed up regularly. I think you’ll be glad you did. And to get you started at least, here is a list of USB external hard drives at Amazon.com.

500 GB USB Hard Drive – Compact and Light Weight External Mass Storage Devices

By Jason Pablo

A Universal Serial Bus or USB is a serial bus standard device that is used to interface various electronic gadgets. A USB allows for peripherals like chargers and printers to be connected to the gadgets through a single standardised interface socket. This helps in improving the plug & play capabilities of the gadgets as they can easily be connected and disconnected, without rebooting the gadgets. A USB also supplies power to low energy consumption devices.

USBs were originally meant to be used on personal computers. But thanks to the advances in technology, these devices are now also widely used in gadgets like personal digital assistants (PDAs) and video game consoles. A USB has become a standard connection method for a majority of these devices. Several variants of USB hard disk drives are available in the markets. These variants have been developed for specific use on various electronic gadgets. One such variant is a 500 GB USB hard drive.

A USB establishes connections to different storage devices by using a set of standards called the USB Mass Storage Device Class Standards. A 500 GB USB hard drive can store up to 500 GB of electronic data on it. A USB is not primarily intended to act as a bus for a computer’s internal storage. This job is better done by buses like ATA and SCSI.

A number of manufacturers are offering high performance external USB hard disk drives to consumers these days. These external drives usually contain a translating device that interfaces conventional technology based drives with a USB. A USB supports three data transfer rates – low speed (187 KB/s), full speed (1.5 MB/s) and high speed (60 MB/s). Researchers are working on a USB drive that will transfer data a “super speed “(600 MB/s). A 500 MB USB hard drive is widely used in many modern computers. Advances in technology have made it possible for these devices to be marketed at lower prices.

Jayson Pablo, a dedicated writer of Rupizcompare.co.uk which provide information on cheap computers and lcd monitors. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jayson_Pablo

]]> http://usbexternalharddrives.net/500-gb-usb-storage-devices/feed/ 0 http://usbexternalharddrives.net/500-gb-usb-storage-devices/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/UsbExternalHardDrives/~3/WVNIckSjzmI/ http://usbexternalharddrives.net/external-hard-drives-buying-guide/#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:29:35 +0000 Lou http://usbexternalharddrives.net/?p=18 External Hard Drives – Buying Guide, By Victor Thomas