A hard drive is the physical data storage in your computer. An external hard drive is simply a box with a hard drive in it. External hard drives are what "techies" prefer to use for data storage because they can be updated with little or no interaction from the user.
Buyer beware. All though Maxtor is a large company, my experience is that their drives fail much more frequently than those of Seagate and Western Digital.
That in mind...using the software that comes with the drive is usually a trial software that will rope you into buying the license. It also many times compresses the data into a format that is not RAW (RAW meaning you can see it without the need for another application). We techies like data to be RAW so you don't need the software that came with the drive in case of failure.
In setting up external drives for my customers, I generally don't use the software that came with them. I set up a free program that works for you in a (what I consider) more satisfactory format. This format is simply a perfect duplicate of your original data.
To find out a bit more about this, I went to Best Buy's website, and searched for external hard drives. As you can imagine, there are a variety to choose from. The Western Digital brand offers 30, ranging in price from $95 for 250 GB of storage space to $340 for 2 TB of space. Average is obviously somewhere in the middle. The size you need depends on how much "stuff" you have on your computer.
I have not purchased my external hard drive yet, but I will do it soon (I promise!) and will write about it here, so you all can learn from my experience.
Until next time...
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