September 7, 2011

This month I want to discuss external hard drives.  External hard drives are getting cheaper by the month.  You can now purchase a good 2 terabyte drive for under $100.  Considering that back in the mid 1990's I paid $400 for a 320 megabyte internal hard drive, the price per megabyte today is unbelievable.

Anyway, I'm a firm believer in using an external drive to store photographs, music, and backups.  The reason being that the least amount of data on your computer hard drive, the better.  Backups will be smaller and much faster and if something happens to your computer hard drive, restoring data will be much easier.

You also need to consider one more thing when you purchase an external drive.  Are you going to leave it connected to your computer?  If so, what happens if your house burns down or someone steals all your computer stuff?  The answer, a second drive.  You simply synchronize both drives once a week, then if something happens to the other drive, you still have a backup.  You keep the other drive in a bank box, at your work location, or a friends house.  That way, the chance of something happening to both of them at the same time is remote.  If one dies or has a problem, yous till have all the software and data on the other drive.

If you took my suggestion about drive imaging, you can keep all the images for all your computers on the drive, and in addition, keep copies of all your software disks.

At any rate, external drives are a great way to go today, and I recommend you consider having at lease one.