We have developed the external hard drive buyers guide to assist you in determining what features are most important to consider in purchasing an external hard drive. We define important features needed to get the best performance no matter how you use your hard drive. One feature you want no matter how you use your hard drive is size. The trend of software manufactures to add more multimedia content into their products has caused much larger space requirements. Programs that use to take 2 or 3 Megabyte 10 years ago now take 600 or more Megabytes for the same program.
First you want to know what interfaces your computer supports, does it support USB 2.0 or 3.0, FireWire 400 or 800, or external SATA. Each interface has its pros and cons. Example USB 2.0 transfer speed is 60Mbits/seconds while USB 3.0 transfer speed is 400Mbits/seconds about 6 times faster, and a little bit faster than SATA 2.0 with a speed of 300Mbits/seconds. However, if all you have is a USB 2.0 port you do not get the speed advantage of the faster interface without buying an interface card.
Other features external hard drive buyers guide suggest that you should look for is Rotational Speed: the higher the better, how fast can we read the information off the drive. Seek Speed how fast, on average, drives can find a particular piece of information. How well will it protect your information? Can it physical protect your information from outsiders with a figure printer reader? Can it protect your data from a system crash using RAID? Does it support hot swaps for easy transfers? These are all the questions you should ask before purchasing an external hard drive.
