These drives come in a couple different formats: First, you have your typical USB flash drive. This is a portable drive, even if it isn’t the normal type of harddrive that you’re used to. These drives come in a large number of shapes and sizes, with some promotional USB drives looking like something out of Star Trek (drives that look like phasers and whatnot, not kidding!). Typically these portable USB drives come with anywhere between 1 GB and 128 GB, which is a far cry from when I was even in college 8 years ago. I remember freshman year being handed a flash drive with 64 MB of space. Hah! If only…
The second type of portable harddrive is the typical external USB hard drive that you might already be used to. These can be much larger than 128 GB, with some going up into the terabyte level (I’ve seen some that are 2 TB). The only issue with these is that sometimes they do take specific drivers to run, but don’t worry: If you’re using an up to date Windows machine with XP, Vista, or Windows 7, you’ll be just fine with this most likely. Just plug and play. However, they are bulky and a little tough to walk around with. If you have the option of using a flash drive I’d probably just do that. It’ll make your life much easier, trust me.
Oh, I forgot to talk about another type of portable harddrive: The internal drive put into an enclosure. These aren’t normally designed to be walked around with, but you can do this if you’d like. Most of them are designed to be used as external drives to supplement your own harddrive, but in a pinch you can certainly unplug it and take it somewhere. You may certainly need specific drivers for this type of application, and you’ll need to have gone out and buy a housing for the drive itself. It’s a little bit more work, but in the end it may be a little less expensive than buying a standard external.
So, I hope this has helped you some. Keep in mind that some of the best portable harddrives are the ones that cost the least!
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