Shopping To Buy An External Hard Disk ?. Some Helpful Info.

History Of The External Hard Disk

The earliest external hard disk was enormous. Almost certainly 100 times bigger than todays and only capable of holding just a few megabytes of data !. At that time files was held externally to the computer so it really earned the name external hard disk. Due to the lack of capacity these external hard disks were swappable so the large mainframe computer could have access to more data.

The External hard Disk These days

With the end of the 20th century, internal drives took over as system of choice for personal computers using Windows, while external hard drives remained popular for much longer on the Apple Macintosh and other professional workstations which provided external SCSI ports. Apple made such interfaces available by default from 1986 and 1998. The addition of USB and Firewire interfaces to standard personal computers led these kind of drives to become commonplace in the PC market also. These new interfaces supplanted the more complex and high-priced SCSI interfaces, leading to standardization and cost reductions for the external hard drive.

The inner structure of external hard disk drives resembles normal hard disk drives; in fact, they include a normal hard disk drive which is mounted in a disk enclosure. For an external hard disk now the capacities range from 160 GB to 4TB and the cost per gigabyte varies between .15 and .40 USD.

As an external hard disk keeps the platters and moving heads of conventional hard drives they are much less tolerant of physical jolts than flash-based technology (a fact often overlooked by customers lulled into a false sense of ruggedness by their styling).

Larger models often include full-sized 3.5″ PATA or SATA desktop hard drives, can be purchased in the same size ranges, and typically carry a similar cost. More expensive models, especially drives with biometric security or several interfaces, generally cost considerably more per gigabyte. Smaller, portable 2.5″ drives intended for laptop and embedded devices are slightly more expensive in cost per GB compared with larger capacity 3.5″ drives. Small MP3 players, previously built around mechanical hard drive technology are now primarily solid state CompactFlash based devices.

If you are really looking at a external hard disk visit http://500gbportableharddrive.org This useful web site has information on all the models and the best prices on the internet AND you can purchase with 100% confidence.

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