External Hard Drives - The best place to hold your data?

External hard disk drive sales are consistently growing, this transportable media allows large capacities of data to be moved around to be used in various locations. This is ideal for students transporting information from college and university to their home computer, photographers, etc. They are also widely used to backup data from internal hard disk drives.

Some hard drive manufacturers produce and sell their drives as rugged storage devices that are built to be knocked around, they are more secure however they are not immune to failure. Hard drives are made up of moving parts; therefore transporting the drive may cause the drive to fail as they can easily be dropped, knocked or crushed. They can also easily be knocked off tables by their trailing wires or data cables, or just knocked off tables.

Unlike internal drives, which are cooled by a fan, external drives seldom have cooling fans because manufacturers aim to make them as small as possible.

So how can we limit the chances of external hard drive failure?

If you are carrying your external from place to place, protect it and treat it like the family silver (the data on it may be harder and more expensive to replace than the silver).

When connecting it to your computer, position it safely and watch where the cables run to avoid mishap.

Backup the data on the external, or use it as the backup. Backup regularly and religiously, the gremlins know when you have that crucial file that you meant to backup, but had not quite got round to it!When choosing an external, is the biggest capacity and/or cheapest necessarily the best? would perhaps a better quality smaller capacity external still be more than big enough?

Is the smallest size the best? or would a slightly larger one with a fan or at least some breathing room for the drive inside be a better option?

Hopefully this has given you a few points to ponder, and hopefully you will not be reading this because you have fallen foul of a failed/dropped/deleted external.