Does anyone remember their first external hard drive? Usually a monster in a heavily fortified casing that was as fragile as eggshells. If you were lucky you may have got an extra forty gigabytes memory for your computer. Compare that to today’s market where you can carry two hundred gigabytes in your penny pocket, although there may be no room for the condom. They are faster, more reliable and a lot cheaper than in their first incarnation in the 1980’s.

Essentially an external hard drive is designed to give extra storage. Connected to your desktop or laptop externally using fire-wire or USB ports they are an increasingly popular tool in the mobile age. As they can still be prone to damage from knocks and vibrations an outer casing gives protection to the hard drive. Essentially this is due to how they are constructed.

A magnetised rotating disk that can rotate at a mind-boggling seven thousand rpm is within the hard drive casing. The disks are prone to damage and decreased performance just like a CD or DVD. Laptops have smaller discs and thus fewer rotations per minute tend to mean a decreased performance. Normally quoted in gigabytes or even terabytes the capacity of a hard drive these days is, a far cry from the megabyte age of zip and floppy disks. They are getting much smaller but they still vary in size. In today’s market with portable hard drives and pen drives you can basically take your memory anywhere.

The end of the external hard drive could be near thanks to flash memory storage that most portable hard drives and memory sticks use. They are still the lowest cost random access re-writable storage solution, which keeps them at the top of the game just now. Probably most at risk from compact flash memory drives are smaller hard drives that cannot quite compete. Many companies are already investing in combining the old school magnetised disks with flash memory capabilities. The future lies in the design of hybrid drives for mass storage capabilities.

The external hard drive is not dead yet. Despite the improvements seen in portable hard drives and memory sticks the hard drive still has a role to play but they will need to continue developing to keep up. It is still probable that they will join the Dodo and floppy disk in the distant past.

Do you need an external hard drive? Low Price Memory is a great site to check out for external hard drives, computer memory and bluetooth headsets at prices you can afford.

– David Ross