An external hard drive is a storage device that’s connected to your computer through several different interfaces such as USB, SATA, FireWire or SCSI. These hard drives are self contained, meaning you can easily transport them in their protective case and connect them to a variety of different computers, possibly even computers running completely different operating systems. The external interface makes these drives compatible across many different platforms.
In the early 1980s, an external hard drive on your computer was a luxury. They were extremely expensive and only held a few megabytes of information. Nothing compared to what hard drives are able to store today. It wasn’t until the mid to late 1980s that hard drives became standard issue in most new PCs. Many Apple PCs of that era used external hard drives exclusively, connecting via the standard SCSI port.
Through the 1990s as technologies such as decoupled granular microstructure became more popular, external hard drives increased in size exponentially. Most PCs of this era were made using internal hard drives which couldn’t be easily removed to connect to other computers. At this time the only external hard drive standard that existed was SCSI, and these drives were much more expensive than their internal counterparts. It wasn’t until after 1998 when USB 1.1 was introduced that external hard drives became more portable and affordable.
Through the 2000s external hard drives became an increasingly popular way to store information. With additional standards such as FireWire and external SATA being introduced, external hard drives began to flourish. They became an inexpensive way to complete a variety of tasks including sharing information between computers, system backups and more.
External hard drives are a quick and easy way to perform regular disk cloning on your PC. Disk cloning is when you copy the entire contents of one hard drive to another. Usually the first hard drive will create an image file which is then loaded onto the second hard drive. Disk cloning is especially helpful when upgrading to a larger hard drive or restoring a hard drive to a previous state.
You can even run a virtual machine from an external hard drive. Virtual machines allow you to run a completely different operating system on top of your current operating system, usually in an application such as VMware Workstation. This can be useful if you want to try a new operating system without installing it to your main hard drive, or if you want to run an older operating system for software compatibility reasons.
External hard drives also make excellent scratch disks for graphic designers. Scratch disks are used as temporary storage for software applications such as Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop requires more resources than most computers make available, making a scratch disk necessary for additional storage that system RAM can’t handle. Using an external hard drive as a scratch disk is convenient as you never have to worry about your scratch disk storage filling up your system drive, or your system drive becoming too full to support the necessary amount of temporary storage.
You can also benefit from an external hard drive if you are using a laptop computer. Generally laptop computers will only support a single internal hard drive, and can be expensive to upgrade and replace if you aren’t very tech savvy. Adding an external hard drive to your laptop will give you the extra storage you need to hold all your pictures, videos and music. You can also perform full system backups without having to burn a dozen DVDs or possibly hundreds of CDs. With ever increasing file sizes and access to media online, an external hard drive is a must have for laptop and desktop PC owners alike.