The Portable External Hard Drive

Portable external hard drives are usually 2.5" hard drives (laptop hard drives) in a slimline enclosure, making them easy to carry. Although they are portable, they are not unbreakable and extra care is needed

while transporting them, for example, don't put them in your back pocket and then sit down!
The portable external hard drive is commonly "USB Powered", which means you don't have to carry a separate power supply unit
around with you. The only downside to this, is that the available current (power) is limited to the computer it is attached to.

This may not seem like a big problem, but if you have many other USB powered devices connected to the same computer (especially when connected to a laptop/notebook), then you will find the USB powered external hard drive will not perform optimally.

Some of the portable external hard drives that are available come with a separate USB power cable, which provides an extra power boost to the hard drive if required.

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What is an External Hard Drive?

An external hard drive is the same type of hard drive as you would find inside a PC or laptop, except that it is mounted in a separate enclosure. It can be used to store information (data) permanently or temporarily, in the same way as a computer's hard drive.

External hard drives (the actual drive itself) come in two main sizes (physical size), 2.5" and 3.5". The 2.5" drives are the same as you would find in a laptop computer, whereas the 3.5" drives are identical to hard drives found in desktop PCs. The difference is in the interface that connects the external hard drive to your computer.

Usually external hard drives connect to the computer via a USB/Firewire cable, most modern operating systems will automatically recognise the hard drive as a storage device, and assign it a drive letter.

The fact that external hard drives are simply placed in an enclosure, means you can usually change the actual hard drive itself without too much effort. This allows you to swap drives between enclosures, so you only have to buy one enclosure for many drives (of the same type).

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