Best External Hard Drive

Best external hard drive as voted for by TestFreaks was the Western Digital WDMT 4000 which scored 10 out of 10. Its plus points were that it is quiet, has plenty of storage and a nice design. The biggest negative was that it doesn't come with a HDMI cable.

What is an external hard drive? It is a disk drive like the one you have inside your PC, but it is in its own enclosure and sits along side your PC equipment. It connects to your PC via a USB cable or some of them connect to your home router and act as a network drive to be shared between all computers in the home. They tend to have some shock-resistant features because typically they will be exposed to more bumps and scrapes than an internal one.

External Hard Drive

Originally, external hard drives were mainly considered as back up devices. So people would copy all of their important data files, music, video and images to the device and have the comfort of knowing their data was securely "backed up". They were always expensive and therefore not really used in the home, but more of a work tool.

Nowadays, even the best external hard drive does not cost the earth and with disk sizes into the terabytes, consumers are buying them like they buy memory sticks! They are not so much being used for backing up data, but for usable data storage. With downloadable content exploding everywhere, with music, on-demand tv and other media, consumers cannot have enough data storage. Once the disk drive is full, you buy another and plug it in just as you would a USB stick.

Another thing people are doing, is when they make the decision to upgrade their home PC, they would transfer all of the data they have chosen to back onto their new PC and format the disk out of their old PC. You can buy hard disk enclosures from eBay or maplins that will allow you to use this disk as an external drive. An internal hard drive has an IDE connection (rectangular plug with lots of pins). These enclosures convert the IDE connector to a USB connector and the drive behaves in exactly the same way as an external hard drive.

I would recommend buying the best external hard drive you can get as they have a hard life and the cheaper ones are not really built to last.

Best External Hard Drive

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