Looking For An External Hard Disk ?.

The original external hard disk was enormous. About 100 times bigger than todays and only capable of holding just a few megabytes of data !. At that time info was held externally to the computer so it definitely earned the name external hard disk. Because of the insufficient capacity these external hard disks were swappable so the large mainframe computer could have access to much more data.

The External Hard Disk These days

By the end of the 20th century, internal drives took over as system of choice for personal computers running Windows, while the external hard drive remained popular for much longer on the Apple Macintosh along with other professional workstations which supplied external SCSI ports. Apple made such interfaces accessible by default from 1986 and 1998. The addition of USB and Firewire interfaces to standard personal computers led those drives to become commonplace in the Personal computer market also. These new interfaces supplanted the more complex and costly SCSI interfaces, bringing about standardization and cost reductions for the external hard drive.

The internal framework of the external hard disk drives resembles ordinary hard disk drives; actually, 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 retains the platters and moving heads of traditional 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 types often include full-sized 3.5″ PATA or SATA desktop hard drives, can be found in the same size ranges, and usually carry a similar cost. More expensive models, especially drives with biometric security or several interfaces, generally cost significantly more per gigabyte.

Smaller, portable 2.5″ drives intended for laptop and embedded devices are a bit more expensive in cost per GB in contrast to larger capacity 3.5″ drives. Small MP3 players, previously built around mechanical hard drive technology are now primarily solid state CompactFlash based devices.

Filed under External hard Disk