subject: An overview of the Benefits of an External Hard Drive [print this page] With media vastly improving by quality on the PC nowadays it is no wonder why we have to continue to add more capacity to our hard drives to avoid running out of space on our hard disks. The external hard drive is one solution to this problem and it has many more benefits over the internal hard drive.
While even the cheapest external hard drive will carry some added benefits, some of the higher priced external hard drives have many more benefits then an external drive. Starting out with the cheaper external hard drives, these will normally have a capacity of around 500mb and do not offer many extra features. But even without the extra features, they are still great products to buy especially if you travel often and need to take your data with you or if you just need more space for your files.
Some of the better external hard drives will also have a few other benefits and features over the internal hard drive such as a very large capacity for storage up to 3TB (terabytes) or 3000 GB. With such a large amount of space most PC users will not have to worry about running out of space. Another nice feature on some models is the ability to transfer files via Wi-Fi so you will not have to worry about keeping the hard drive right near the PC at all times. Another benefit with the wireless external hard drive is if you have multiple desktops in your home everyone can share the hard drive easily.
Another benefit of having the external hard drive is the ability to back up your PC's operating system and all its files. If you ever have any trouble with your PC you can easily reload your PC with the old configuration without having to worry about losing your old files. Some external hard drives have software for this feature where you can easily backup and restore files from your PC.
Lastly, if you plan to use your external hard drive with a wire there is also Firewire which is about 10x faster then using a USB. If you wish to use Fire-wire, in most cases you will have to purchase this individually at an additional cost. So if you plan to get an external hard drive you can see some of the benefits of having these to keep your data safe and adding more room for storage.
