Portable Hard Drives Are Getting Bigger (not In Size)

By Author: Rybeka Parsons
Total Articles: 5
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Portable hard drives have always been useful as a way of backing up important files and transporting information. These days however they are growing significantly in terms of their capacity and going down in price just as significantly. This means that they can now serve a much wider variety of uses.

With a portable hard drive that offers as much storage as your computer (or nearly as much storage) you can now use one to back up your life's work - all your files, documents and media. This means that should the worst happen to your computer, you won't lose the important stuff; the family photos and novel-attempts that aren't covered by insurance. A large portable hard drive like this can also be useful if you're getting a new computer, or simply doing a format of your old one. This way you can quickly and easily copy all of your data across, meaning that your new machine has access to everything the old one did. We all know how irritating it is to delete a file in a format only to realise that we really could have used it - well with a portable hard drive that needn't happen again.

Portably hard drives are getting ...
... even bigger than that however, and it's highly likely that you'll want to purchase a hard drive that's not merely as big as your computer's, but one that actually overtakes it. While a few gigabytes used to be fairly expensive for a portable hard drive, it's now possible to get easily transportable hard drives that provide up to 1 terabyte of storage at affordable prices (easily under $200 or £100). This is equal to 1024 gigabytes of data which means it's probably a lot larger than your computer's current built-in hard drive (250-500 gigabytes is probably average for a fairly recent computer though terabyte hard drives are available). Just to give you a bit more of an idea of just how big a terabyte is - it should provide storage for roughly 250,000 songs if they are high quality MP3s. Portable hard drives are even threatening to make our very brains obsolete - with the storage capacity of the brain being estimated at around 10 terabytes. That means that a portable hard drive can be 1/10th the size of your brain, giving both your computer and you more space to remember things.

For this reason a portable hard drive becomes not only a great way to back up data, but also to improve your computer's performance using it as a way to give it massively increased storage space. If you have a 500 gigabyte hard drive, adding an additional 1 terabyte portable hard drive will allow you to save all your work and media files twice in order to back them up, but will then give you an additional 524 gigabytes worth of storage. A great use for this is to set aside the portable hard drive as a way to store media files which take up all the space - movies, pictures and music - which will leave your computer with far more space to itself helping it run more smoothly and efficiently.

In this age of technology, portable hard drives have become essential and you should own one too. Author believes in technology and owns computer store in launceston.