External Hard Drive What to Look For?

I remember when having an external hard drive was a luxury and they were big cumbersome things you had to plug into a socket.However, now these devices have become so commonly available, that almost everyone has one of these devices which stores gigabytes of their content including photographs and other content.But in case you are looking to buy an external hard drive, following are some points that you should consider.

Storage
This is the obvious thing you need to consider when looking to buy an external hard drive, how much it can store, it doesn't matter if you want a pink external hard drive or a brushed steel one, it needs to have the right amount of storage.The problem is that most people tend to buy a disk, which has much more storage space as compared to their requirement, just because bigger disks are available.Yes you can buy a 2tb hard drive now from Amazon.com for under $120 which is fantastic value, but that is 2,048gb of storage, more than most people will ever use!Instead think about how much room you really need and then aim for one the next size up from what you think you need.This will ensure that you do not squander money for buying a disk where most of the storage is not going to be utilized.

Power Supply
You should also consider on how the device gets the power for functioning.A variety of the smaller disks, which store up to 500GB come with the option of using the USB port to meet its power requirements, thus making the device highly portable and convenient.On the other hand, owing to the larger power requirements, the bigger disks typically come with an external power supply, which make it less portable since you need access to a power socket, especially when using it with a laptop.

Software Packages
The different hard drives come with their software suites, which provide some good to have features with the drives.For instance, you have backing up software, which can backup the data on your computer and store it in the external hard drive. Also, the software does incremental backups, to ensure minimal disk space utilization and keeping the data up to date with the main drive.However, these backup software solutions do have some issue when you want to selectively take a backup of your content, and often need to be configured properly to get proper behavior.

Information about both the drives and the software and the drive specification details, can be obtained by searching on websites like Amazon.com.Then check out the reviews as well to see what other people think about the reliability of the unit and how useful the software actually is etc.