External Harddrives

[gizbug]

Lately a lot of my friends have been buying an external hard drive for their home pc.
My question is, what is the main purpose people use an external hard drive for?
Is having internal hard drive, with a dvdr burner not enough anymore for people?
Just curious.

 

[toughwimp11]

well dvdr doesnt hold that much. externals are good for storing large amounts of data as backup and transfering. if you have 30 gigs of music, its annoying to burn 8 dvds.
basically: reusability, portablity, size makes it good for backup or transfering

 

[imported_apocalypse]

I have one to transfer games/movies/tv shows to/from my friends and also from computer to computer. Network transfer is not that fast (no gigabit ethernet for me), and internet file transfer is even slower. Its the only way if you want to send a big file to someone and neither has a laptop. Also, I use it to back up files in case of hard drive crash or when I am formatting.

 

[RebateMonger]

Hopefully, some of them are using the external drives to make ongoing backups of their PCs. Losing all of your photos, music, and data when your PC's hard drive breaks (which they ALL do eventually) is bad news.

 

[Roguestar]

"External hard drive
Who needs them?"

People who need to take large amounts of data somewhere to work on it, people who want to easily swap large amounts of data between PCs, people who want a nearby and safer backup solution than an internal drive, people who want more hard drive space but don't have the SATA ports on their motherboard, people who want more hard drive space but don't have the room in their computer case, etc...

 

[MichaelD]

It's all been said already.

My external USB HD has saved my bacon numerous times. You can have the most expensive RAID50 array with multiple online hotspare drives. But if your PS decides it's time to self-destruct or if you get hit with a powersurge so huge it bypasses your UPS (it happens) and it fries your $10K RAID50 SCSI array you'll be damn glad you have a $100, 300GB external USB drive sitting in your closet just waiting for it's day in the sun. :sun:

 

[Zepper]

Yup, backup-backup-backup! External hard drive makes this necessary task easier and quicker (with a eSATA connection) than it has ever been.

.bh.

 

[cubby1223]

It's a good idea to have your backup hard drive not being powered by the same power supply as your primary hard drive.

Duh...

 

[rudder]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Yup, backup-backup-backup! External hard drive makes this necessary task easier and quicker (with a eSATA connection) than it has ever been.

.bh.

More importantly you can store the external drive in a safe location. It does no good to have your backups go up in flames along with your PC.

 

[hoss]

Get yourself two external HDDs. Make a backup on one and leave it somewhere safe that you go regularly. Work is the obvious answer here. Then start a regular backup routine. Backup to the second external HDD and swap it with the one at work. That way you will always have an backup in a safe location.

 

[corkyg]

Last Friday I conducted a 3-hour workshop on external drives. It was a big success. It covered the growing use of all types of external drives - that includes flash memory devices, USB devices, eSATA devices, camera memory modules w/readers and writers, and on and on. It was done with a powerpoint presentation and the physical demo of all sorts of the above drives.

Bottom line . . . they are extremely useful and growing as technology makes them bigger, faster, easier to use, and cheaper.

Yeah - backing up, cloning and duplicating reserve drives was also discussed. Various connections were demo'd to include, USB, Firewire, eSATA, CF, SD, (and variants) and mobile racks.

 

[daw123]

I agree with having external hard drives. All my important files are stored on a 1TB external hard drive with a USB connection. I also have a second internal hard drive (which I haven't installed yet) which I transfer files to from the C: drive, although it is not perfect, as Cubby1223 stated, because it will be powered from the same PSU.

The external hard drive is also useful for transferring files from PC to PC; it is much quicker than using the 'Net and can transfer a lot bigger / number of files than CD or DVD.

Just out of interest, do you know if they are going to bring out a medium which is comparable to modern HDDs (which are 1.5+TB). Even dual layer Blu-Ray discs can only store 50GB.

Removable media always seem to have a much smaller capacity than HDDs.

Whats the scoop on solid state storage? Any big mainstream advancements?

 

[Zepper]

No removable media with really large capacity is in the near future. I treat hard drives like data cartridges. There is a little stand out there that allows you to swap SATA drives (either 3.5" or laptop size in and out like flash cards in a reader. Link:. Tt has one but it is USB (may be others now that I'm unaware of) - I'd always take eSATA over USB for backing up my own systems - any little bit of extra speed is a GOOD THING...

.bh.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Originally posted by: gizbug
Lately a lot of my friends have been buying an external hard drive for their home pc.
My question is, what is the main purpose people use an external hard drive for?
Is having internal hard drive, with a dvdr burner not enough anymore for people?
Just curious.

Dude....how do you backup your stuff? That's what they're usually used for.

 

[corkyg]

I classifiy these as Internal/External. I have two of these new SATA racks in my quad machine, and you can hot swap the inner trays and have removeable storage as big as the drive you put in it. I use a pair of 500 GBs.

EZ-Swap

 

[Ghouler]

A backup button on the external maxtor hard disc is the most convenient way to create backups as you go.
My wife would never touch any software solution but since we have that maxtor disc she just presses the button to create copies.
Great for small office for the same reason. So the benefits are:
- easy backup
- portability
- easy expanding (no need to open the case to add more storage)