External HDD advice please ?

[stephennity]

Hi...the following question will give some indication as to the level of technological understanding and proficiency that I have...or do not have as is clearly the case here !

I wish to get myself an external HDD but would like to ask if there are any issues regards them...can a faulty external HDD damage the computer itself in any way is one such query I have...I have read of various electrical items burning things out...for example,faulty chargers etc...I would not want any faulty item somehow causing an electrical surge or something !

Also I want to ask about the various external HDD's themselves regarding quality...what is the difference in an item that costs just a few pounds/dollars against an item that is maybe ten times that cost ? obviously the cheaper items are of less quality but does that necessarily mean BAD quality ? I am not after anything of the highest quality and would be glad of some advice...hope you may give some advice please.

 

[maxie]

Now is the time to buy external drives as they have never been so cheap I have a Seagate 2 TB have never had any problems I do suggest that you get one that comes with its own power adapter esp if you are using a laptop

 

[stephennity]

Hi and thanks for the input...are SSD externals better than the usual drive type ?

 

[maxie]

SSD drives are much better performance ways also will improve your battery life if using a laptop down side is the cost

 

[stephennity]

Yes...I just looked at some of the SSD drives...hmmm...I will probably take the lesser cost option of the HDD...but I have seen such difference in cost of these...some have been ten times the cost for a similar size HDD and I am at a loss at to know why...is there such a huge difference in quality ? ...I just want something that is adequate to do the job.

 

[brianzion]

Since 1960's, Hard Drives giving several advantages to many home and professional user, but sometime become infamous due to its moving parts, head crash and so on. HDD's are believed to wear out overtime and hence, engineers are seeking out ways to make it more compatible, durable & free from failure. They gave a perfect substitute of any hard drive which nearly sorts the various bogus hard drive problems, popularly known as SSD (Solid State Drive).


Solid State Drives
As everything in this real world has its own pros and cons, so as SSD have too but cases of failing SSD are very few and unlikely to occurs in near future. But let's start from scratch and deeply analyze the benefit of solid drive over hard drives and vice versa, so you could decide the best one for your netbook, laptop, nettop or desktop.
Differentiating Hard drives with Solid state drive:

Physical Parts
Traditional hard drive contains physical equipments like platters, heads, spindle motor etc. to store data, perform read/write operation and many others. A hard drive uses platters with magnetic coating to store data on hard drive and maintains it even after no power source is connected. Solid state drive operates in same manner but without using any platters, as it has series of flash memory chips for storing data. Now a days, hard drive comes with a huge storing capacity and easily available unlikely any solid drives which is far more slim and free from power failure.

Storing Technology
Hard drive use to store data in fragments. That means, while saving data, files were scattered in contiguous blocks throughout the sectors and blocks. But Solid state drives are completely different and doesn't needed fragmentation as it's has no physical read heads, which makes it more faster in storing data, launching application etc.

Both HDD and SSD are designed to fight well against failure but SSD can operate more efficiently in harsher environment without failing where HDD does fails. Since most HDD's are fail while doing read operation, rather than SDD which often fails during write operation. Your data is more likely to corrupt due to fail read operation, so we can say that SSD's are very rare cases of failure in compare to HDD's.

Capacity:
As with growing storing needs, normal user demands up to 250 GB to 1+ TB of hard drive but SSD's are less likely to fill that gap right away. The maximum storage capacity of recently launched SSD of 128 GB which didn't seems to fulfill the current storing needs and once again HDD's shines at the top.

Speed:
This is where SSD's become the first choice among users who wants to make their PC even faster. SSD's are significantly fast in booting Windows, transferring files, launching application etc.

Conclusion:
It's all up to you to choose the one which best suites to your pocket, energy and data security. HDD's can be preferred if money, capacity and availability are your primary concern but SSD's could be best if you are looking for a hard drive having a great reliability, raggedness or didn't need fragmentation etc.
Since SSD's can be used for Windows & MAC both, it provides the equal benefit to both platform user and soon gets the popularity what it deserves.