External Hard Drive Buying Guide

Wallet Impact

Price	Description	Good Pick  (see all External Hard Drives)
$	Thumb drives up to 1GB can be had for as little as $30, and desktop external hard drives start at around $100. For high-capacity external hard drives, you’ll find storage space up to 80GB, USB connections, and slower RPM and transfer speeds. These external hard drives are a great place to store documents, music, and family photos.	Seagate FreeAgent™ Go 250 GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive Compare prices at 6 stores $86 - $126
$$	Storage space scales up considerably in the range from $175-$400. These single-disk external hard drives offer faster read and write speeds, storage up to 500GB, and multiple connectivity options, including SATA and FireWire. External hard drives in this range are ideal for regular system backups and storing multimedia files, but they may be too limited for multimedia artists and editors. Look for card-reader functions on some of these external drives.	LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ Hard Drive with 1 TB, 7200 rpm, with FireWire 800, ... Buy now at $269.95
$$$	Specialized drives for network, high-capacity backup, and digital media use start at around $450. Transfer speeds should be the first consideration when buying these high-performance external hard drives. Look for FireWire and SATA connections, dual-disk drives, and storage capacity of 1TB or more.	Maxtor OneTouch™ III Turbo Edition (C01W015) 1.5 TB FireWire 400 (1394a) Hard Drive Compare prices at 3 stores $407 - $568

shop talk

A single unit of digital storage space on an external hard drive. A megabyte (MB) is equal to one million bytes, a gigabyte (GB) equals 1,024 megabytes, and a terabyte (TB) is a thousand gigabytes.

A condition that occurs when data from a single file is stored in several disconnected areas on the surface of an external hard drive’s disk. Fragmented files slow down the read time on an external hard drive.

A high-capacity connection between an external hard drive and a PC. FireWire typically offers the fastest transfer speeds for digital files.

A solid-state storage device used in thumb drives, cell phones, digital cameras, and other portable devices.

The process of segmenting a single external hard drive disk into several smaller spaces, each with their own unique ID.

Redundant Array of Independent Disks is a system that uses mirrored data stored on two separate disks with a single controller to improve speed and reduce data loss.

Revolutions per minute, the speed at which an external hard drive spins. Higher speeds allow for faster data reading.

Serial Advanced Technology Attachment is the new standard for connecting PCs and external hard drives. By processing data files sequentially, it can speed read and write times to an external hard drive.

Another name given to small external hard drives that can be carried on a keychain or slipped into a pocket.

Universal Serial Bus is the standard for connecting PCs and peripherals, such as external hard drives, keyboards, and mice. These connections pass data and power back and forth between the devices and are not as fast as other connection options.