A Beginner's Guide to External Hard Drives

In a period of time that took place not that long ago, computers were sold with very small hard drives compared to today's standards. A 500mb 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 dredded 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 whereever you go. Plus, you don't have to install any special software for external hard drives because the software is already built into Windows. They are very portable and easy to use.

How to choose the right external hard drive - External hard drives come in a variety of sizes. They can be as small as 160 gigabytes, to as large as 2 terabyte(2000gb!). If you just want an external hard drive to store MP3's and pictures, a 160gb-250gb hard drive would do just fine. If you want to store lots of movies and other things, then look for an external hard drive that can hold 500gb or more. The more files you want to store, the more space you're going to need.

Next Page: Buying An External Hard Drive for Cheap

Western Digital My Book Essential 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive From $119.49 at Amazon.com

Hitachi SimpleDrive 1.0TB External Hard Drive From $89.99 at Amazon.com

SimpleTech by Hitachi Signature Mini 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive From $199.00 at Amazon.com