The Pros



External Hard Disk Drives come in a variety of storage capacity sizes. They allow you to have hundreds of additional Gigabytes storage with high data transfer rates. The best part is that you can plug them into a Laptop , Desktop, Server, Memory card, Camera or IPod. They vary dramatically in actual size as well. A drive could be as small as a pen drive, or large enough to contain terabytes of data. Add to that the fact that they are sold at very reasonable prices have really helped bring about a serious boom in removable storage. In fact, it is no longer a rare site to see removable drives of different kinds being used all around us for different purposes.

So, What's the catch?

Mystically, external drives have been found to be failing for no apparent reason. Why is that, you wonder? Well, here's the thing. With the advent of technology, bigger and larger removable hard disk drives are being produced to cater to our constantly growing backups and valuable data, music & photo files emerging from both Apple-Mac systems & Xservers, as well as Pc's. As a result, smaller drives are being produced with more and more storage capacity built into them.

It has been seen, that as a result of increase in storage capacity being accommodated within a casing of the same size, inherent design flaws are increasingly being noticed. However slick the casings may appear on the outside, they are often have poor ventilation, and in some cases, no ventilation at all! When assembling their product, external hard drives assemblers generally tend to pick up the cheapest available drives such as Maxtor & Seagate. When these drives are permanently enclosed in a poorly ventilated casing, this combination is highly potent, and potentially catastrophic for any given user, especially when the external hard disk drive is a high capacity drive which containing crucial back-up data!

A good example of this is the 250Gb Maxtor IDE in RAID array. A lot of the 1 terabyte LaCie external drives contain 250Gb Maxtor IDE in RAID array are found installed in badly ventilated enclosures. When used on a regular basis, especially within an office environment, they prove highly disastrous and essentially ineffective.

So - now what?

Well, for serious about their data backup, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Hitachi has recently unveiled a drive which has a huge capacity of one terabyte (TB). The drive looks just like any other drive, but uses perpendicular magnetic recording to make space for the data contained within. Drives were earlier using LRT-Longitudinal Recording Technology, which records bits of data laying horizontally. This has now been superseded by the recording of bits standing vertically. It's a great package - if you can afford it, as the cost is in the region of just $18,000!