Solid State External Hard Drives, SSD’s, Are The Future of File Storage
The current hard drives that are in almost every computer, and used in almost every external hard drive, may soon go the route of the floppy disk and become extinct. That’s because they’re soon to be replaced with solid state drive
A solid state drive, also called an SSD, has no moving parts. Instead, an SSD stores data inside flash memory. Because of the lack of moving parts, the reliability of solid state drives is vastly superior to current hard drives. Compared to current hard drives, solid state drives are:
- More energy efficient because they have no moving parts.
- Much faster because they don’t have to “spin” to find data.
- More reliable because they don’t contain moving parts that are prone to breaking.
- Virtually silent because again, there are no moving parts.
Solid state drives aren’t really a new technology as they’ve been around pretty much since computers themselves. They used to be wildly expensive, and weren’t able to hold much data. But in recent years, things have changed. Solid state drives are still pricey compared to traditional hard drives, but their prices have been slashed dramatically. In 2008, an 80gb solid state drive cost about $1,200.00. Today, an 80gb solid state drive
Where to Buy External Hard Drives for Cheap
All the major office-supply stores such as Staples and OfficeMax sell external hard drives. So do all of the major electronics stores such as Best Buy, Comp USA, and Sixth Avenue. However, if you buy an external hard from from them, you may not be getting the best deal. The best deals for external hard drives can be found online. And the best place to buy them online, is at Amazon.com
You can save up to 50% by buying your external hard drive on Amazon.com instead of in a retail store. The hard drives for sale on Amazon.com are exactly the same as the ones in the store, but much cheaper. After doing some research, and reading some reviews about different external hard drives, I bought a brand-new 1TB external hard drive
You could probably save a little more money buy purchasing a used external hard drive off of eBay. However, it’s best to purchase a brand-new external hard drive because it’ll be covered under the manufacturer’s warranty, just in case something goes wrong. Plus, a used external hard drive isn’t that much cheaper then a brand new one, so the savings is minimal.
Click here for the best deals on External Hard Drives from Amazon.com
How to Make Your Own External Hard Drive
The best way to save a lot of money on an external hard drive is to make your own! Making your own external hard drive couldn’t be any easier and by doing so you could be saving a lot of money. To make your own external hard drive, you only need three things. They are:
- A Hard Drive Enclosure
- A USB Cable (Most of the time hard drive enclosures come with USB cables)
- A New or Used Hard Drive.
Here are the steps to making your own external hard drive:
Step 1 – Make a decision on how much storage capacity you want your external hard drive to have. Do you want a 50GB external hard drive, or a 500GB one? The more storage capacity you need, the more you’ll end up paying for the hard drive.
Step 2 – Buy a hard drive that has the storage capacity you need. The best prices for hard drives can be found on eBay or Amazon.com
Step 3 – Buy a hard drive enclosure
Click here to buy hard drive enclosures from Amazon.com
Step 4 – The final step is to put them all together, which only takes a minute or two. Because there are so many different hard drive enclosures for sale, it’s impossible to give you specific directions on how to install your hard drive into the enclosure. You’re hard drive enclosure should come with instructions on how to install your hard drive in it. More than likely though, your hard drive should slide right into the enclosure. Then you can plug in the USB Cord, and connect it to the USB Port on your computer. You don’t need to install any software because it’s already installed on Windows XP & Vista. Turn on the hard drive, and there you have it! You’re own external hard drive that you made yourself! Now that wasn’t too hard, huh?
How to Install an External Hard Drive
External hard drives are very easy to install and it only takes about 30 seconds. If it’s a USB external hard drive
It may look a tad different depending on what kind of external hard drive you have. And Windows may assign your external hard drive a drive letter other than E:, but the point is that you’ll notice you have a new hard drive you didn’t have before. Double click on the hard drive icon and you can drag and drop files to your external hard drive. It’s as easy as that!
On a Mac, when you plug in your external hard drive, it will appear right on your desktop, usually in the upper right hand corner of your screen. Just double click on the hard drive icon to open it into Finder, and then you can drag and drop files as you wish. When you need to “eject” your external hard drive from your Mac, don’t just unplug it. Instead, click on the hard drive icon and drag it to Trash to safely eject the drive from your Mac. Sometimes your Mac could be writing information to the external hard drive without your knowledge, and by unplugging it you could damage the external hard drive or loose data.
A Beginner’s Guide to External Hard Drives
Not too long ago, computers were sold with very small hard drives compared to today’s standards. A 5 or 10 gigabyte hard drive was all that was needed back then, because the software and games didn’t take up too much space. Fast forward 10 years, and now we are demanding much more from our computers. We want our computers to store tons of movies, games, music, and pictures. Those things take up lots of space on a computer’s hard drive, and before you know it you see that dreaded little yellow bubble pop up from the bottom-right corner of your screen saying “LOW DISK SPACE! RUN DISK CLEANUP NOW!”.
Enter the External Hard Drive. External hard drives are great for storing your music, movies, pictures, and whatever else you want to store on them. An external hard drive plugs right into a USB port on a computer, so you can take it with you wherever you go. Plus, you don’t have to install any special software for external hard drives because the software is already built into Windows and Mac. They are very portable and easy to use.
Why use an external hard drive? – If your computer’s hard drive has a lot of files, it can slow your computer down dramatically. To speed up your computer, you can transfer files such as photos, music, videos, games, and documents to an external hard drive to free up some space on your computer’s hard drive. An external hard drive can also be used to back up important files in case your computer crashes, such as work documents or digital photos. An external hard drive can also be used to backup your computer’s hard drive.
How much storage space would I need? – External hard drives come in a variety of sizes. They can be as small as 250 gigabytes
Should I get a USB or FireWire External Hard Drive? USB and FireWire are very similar speed wise. In some cases, FireWire is just a little bit faster than USB. However, USB external hard drives