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External Hard Drives

Do you just have too much media/programs/games on your computer?  Many people's first instinct when they notice their hard drive is almost full is to purchase a new hard drive.  Most of the time, however, this is  anew internal hard drive.  Although internal hard drives have many advantages (security, speed, storage) there are many advantages for external hard drives as well.

One of the greatest things about external hard drives is portability.  If you need to take your movie collection somewhere, bring data to a meeting, or play your games elsewhere, an exteranl hard drive is a great option.  The price of a good external hard drive is dropping fast enough that they're almost as cheap as an internal hard drive for the same amount of storage.

Why would you not want an external hard drive? Internal hard drives are faster at reading/writing data then external hard drives.  This is because they are connected directly via SATA or another connection to your computers mothboard.  External hard drives, however, connect via USB or Firewire which forms a sort of bottleneck where your data can't write/read fast enough.