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How to Buy the Best External Hard Drive
This article will help you to buy the best external hard drive for your computer. External hard drives are used for easy transfer of data between computers and storage/backup of data.
More importantly you can use them to store your data backups. You are backing up your data right? Data backup is essential to restore your hard drive after a catastrophic failure of your drive. Obviously you cannot store the backed up data on your existing hard drive. If you're not backing up or ghosting your hard drive you need to be. It's not a matter of if it will fail, but when your hard drive will fail. It will happen to you. Believe it. So backup your hard drive. I'll also present my own solution to data backup.
You should be looking for the same specs as covered on the best hard drives page to help in buying the best external hard drive. One difference though is the way you will interface the external hard drive to the computer you're backing up or transferring files to or from. In the case of the best external hard drive the interface needs to be USB 2.0. If you're not too concerned about the speed of data transfer go with USB 1.1. USB 1.1 drives may be cheaper, but they are slow. USB 2.0 is forty times faster than USB 1.1. USB 1.1 transfer speed is agonizing, especially if you are dealing with large files or the backup of a large hard drive. USB 1.1 data transfer rate is 12 MB/s compared to USB 2.0 which transfers at 480 MB/s.
The storage capacity for the best external hard drive is the next big question. If you are going to backup your C: drive the external drive needs the capacity to hold the image created by your backup software. In my case, I use Norton Ghost 9.0. I have found it to be an excellent and reliable way to backup data. In fact, I got the opportunity to test it right after I initially imaged my drive. This happened while doing security updates for Windows XP. It took 7 minutes to re-ghost my drive after it mysteriously wouldn't boot after installing a bunch of XP security updates. Granted it was a small image(10 GB), but I was still impressed and gratified that I didn't have to start from scratch restoring my drive.
Norton Ghost 9.0 compresses the files to about 50% of the original size. So if for example you are using a 80 GB hard drive and you are using 40 GB of that for the OS + your other files, you will need at least a 40 GB external hard drive to back up your system. That's assuming you want a external hard drive for backup. You could get by with a smaller drive just for data storage. Anyway it's probably better to go with an external hard drive that is the same size or larger than your current drive. That way you don't have to worry about it, and you can use the external drive for storage and backup.
The best external drive will be:
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