Yes, a USB external harddrive is a great tool for business, but it also can do wonders for you personally. Have you ever had a computer crash and lose all of your data? We’ve all had that happen at one point or another I’m sure. I know I have; in fact, it happened just a few weeks back. If I’d have had an external drive to backup all of my stuff to, well, I wouldn’t have lost all of that valuable data. Certain USB harddrives will allow you to automatically backup your data on a set schedule. The software that comes with the drive will actually let you schedule your backups for any time of the day. That’s great because you don’t want your day interrupted by a program doing a full backup; you can just set it up to do it while you’re sleeping at night. Set the calendar program, press “schedule,” and it’s all set. Long gone are the “drag and drop” days of backing up (though, that still does have its place).
Not only can you back up your files, these things are extremely portable. The more portable the drive is though, the more expensive it will tend to be (again,excluding flash drives). The very small types of drives with large capacities (500 GB or more) are going to run $200+ with a USB interface. That’s certainly more expensive than getting an internal drive, but if you consider that an internal harddrive would require you to carry an entire laptop around, well, suddenly the price is a little bit more worth it.
So, a portable USB harddrive can really help you out no matter who you are and what you do. Check them out at just about anywhere computer peripherals are sold.
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]]>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.
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