External Drives

External drives are the best solution for every storage problem, and they actually evolve very rapidly since they got cheap enough for people to buy some more of them, giving companies motivation to develop more of them and in more variety. Nowadays many different solutions are available, and for nearly every need there is a corresponding cheap harddisk drive.

Many people struggle finding enough storage to store all their different media, movies files, which can easily be from 800MB to 4.3GB in size and audio files or pictures which, with the rise of cheap digital cameras, have become more and more popular and easy to use. It is not uncommon for people to have over 10000 music tracks, pictures and over 300 movies on their PC! And since more people download these files instead of buying them on DVD they need more and more space.

Finding the right type of external drive is not easy if you don't know your way around the common models and brands, and a few big names are of course Toshiba, WesternDigital and LaCie. You should ask yourself what you need the external drive for, and what your user profile is. What you should choose immediately depends on what you need in an external drive:

• Space: If all you need is as much space as you can get for movies, massive bittorrent downloading, multiple video editing, huge music and photo libraries and a lot of graphics-heavy games, you should opt for an external drive box which, for a cheap price, allows you to put in multiple internal harddisk drives, making them available outside your PC. This way you can buy a lot of cheap space and set it up as an external drive. Boxes of 10 or 20TB are easily put together this way.
• Speed: If you need enormous speed, going with a single, smaller drive is your best bet. Especially if you use it for smaller files (office files, documents) since these should be saved and transferred rapidly. 
• Portability: Just as with speed, portability is obviously tied to size. You should take something tiny in space and powered by USB only so that you can take it around with you in your bag and not worry about being somewhere without your files. This is only useful if you don't have a lot to take around with you, of course.