(Untitled)

[jonathanddr]

Do any people that are good with computers know anything about external hard drives? I was considering buying one just to put my music/videos/etc. on because my computer is running out of space, but will this limit its lifetime because it won't be being used just as a back-up drive? If I am accessing the drive on a daily basis will that be bad

Comments

[anakedg]

It would probably be worth it to just get another internal hard drive, because they are cheaper than external drives, if you are going to use it everyday anyways. This is unless you already have 4 IDE devices, anything like a hard drive or cd rom drive would be an IDE device.

[jonathanddr]

If I don't care about the price, is there a difference?

[anakedg]

Well, i dont think there would be a downside to accessing an external drive all the time really as far as life of the drive, the only thing is, such a drive, unless you have a firewire port and especially found a drive that supported firewire you would probably be connecting with a USB connection.

The max USB transmission speed is 480 megabits per second.

Depending on how new your computer is/what internal hard drive speed you would buy, the speed would be 3.3 megabytes per second to 133 megabytes per second. And if your computer had serial ATA connections, which, it probably doesnt it would be even faster than that.

So, storing files on the hard drive wouldnt be bad nessasarly for music like Mp3s but if you were storing videos and things, there would be a longer time to store, and to access files from an external hard drive than from an internal one.