The USB hard drive: THE best peripheral

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Let me tell you this: From my experience, a USB hard drive is one of the most useful peripherals you can have when it comes to your laptop. The uses of such a drive are many: You can add capacity to an existing system without taking apart your laptop and physically adding a new hard drive, you can keep all of your data intact without reformatting (see #1), you can keep private data away from your main system, have a great place to store your pictures, movies, etc., and best yet: You can make full backups of everything you do on your laptop. Take it from a person who has lost a lot of data over the years due to computer crashes: Having backups is going to save you lots of heartache and frustration. You’ll always have two copies of all of your essential data, pictures of loved ones, etc.

So why an external USB hard drive and not other types? It’s simple, really: A USB connection is universal (duh), in that it connects to just about every personal computer known to man at this point in time. USB peripherals are all over the industry at this point: everything from printers to a simple USB wireless card are available in the Universal Serial Bus format. If your own personal laptop fails, you can be quite sure that you’ll find another computer with a USB 2.0 port that’ll allow you to retrieve your backup data. There’s no fear of having a “brick,” which is the geek’s way of referring to a piece of hardware that’s, well, useless or outright dead.

Another great thing about getting a USB external hard drive is that they’re cheap. I mean, really cheap. A 2 terabyte (yes, you heard that right…terabyte) USB 2.0 drive from Seagate will run you about, oh, $200-$300 USD depending on where you get it. You couldn’t get anything near that with a standard internal notebook hard drive. Heck, I don’t even think such a hard drive even exists right now outside of external form.

I will say this, though: This thing is pretty big. I mean, it sits beside your laptop, and is a full 7″ tall and 2″ wide. It’s not going to clutter up your desk, but the wiring and space it may take up will be something you’ll want to think about before going out to the store and picking one up. Honestly though, I think I could live with the space it takes up on the desk when it gives me a bottomless pit of data at my fingertips. Imagine the size of your iTunes collection after you get this bad boy. Disclaimer: I did not just tell you to go out and spend all of your money on iTunes to fill this up, so don’t send me your nasty letters. ;)

Alright everyone, as always, stay tuned right here and we’ll talk later on about more USB hard drive information you might be interested in.

Shopping:

Seagate Expansion 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive ST310005EXA101-RK
Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBABM0010BBK-NESN (Midnight Black)
Iomega Prestige 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 34919 (Gray)
Toshiba 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive HDDR320E04XW (Vivid White)
Toshiba 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive HDDR500E04XK (Black)

Related posts:

  1. Buying the best 1TB internal hard drive
  2. Grab a USB harddrive today
  3. Selecting the best backup drives
  4. A word on the 2.5″ hard drive
  5. 500GB hard drive: Why you should get one

Filed Under Hard Drives, Peripherals | 1 Comment

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One Response to “The USB hard drive: THE best peripheral”

  1. Backup Drives on November 17th, 2009 6:04 pm

    [...] come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and are generally powered by USB for smaller applications. A USB hard drive is typically what you’ll want for an at-home computer that may not have too many important [...]

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