External Hard Drives
By Jon Cohen
I have recently been ask my many people my thoughts on external hard drives. Not speaking about brands or models but more about the concept of buying a ready made or building your own.
In one case you need not have any tech savviness, while in the other you need to know the basics.. very basic. But why choose one over the other? Price is a big factor for most people, in fact it is the number one factor for most people. When looking at price point it is clear that you will get your best bang for the buck with building your own. The prices for OEM hard drives get cheaper each week and you can find 1TB drives today for prices below $70.00. Pair that with external enclosure that go for $20.00 plus about 12 mins to install it and you’ve got a nice 1TB external backup drive for under $100.00. Great right? Well yes and no, yes it is a great price but you need to watch out for the trap that most consumers fall into, that would be buying too small or too big. You don’t want to end up wishing you would have bought a larger size a month after. Cause then you will either go out and buy an additional OEM drive or you will buy another kit. Thus ending up with two external drives rather then just one, one which you needed originally. It is hard to figure out what the right size drive is for your needs because lets face it we keep creating more data. From digital pictures to movies, and documents too we are faced with a never ending, continuously growing collection of data. Data that continues to become more and more important to you as it grows. Most people underestimate the amount of data they have to backup. So this best rule to keep in mind is that if you can afford to go to the next capacity up (so from 1TB to 1.5TB) it is worth it. So, do it right the first time and keep backing your data up.