Networking & Communications

External Hard

What You Need To Know About External Hard Drives & Data Recovery

External hard drives, also called portable hard drives, are a popular choice for data storage among consumers for both business and personal use. External drives offer the convenience of allowing for expanded storage capacity for your data, the ability to back up your internal drives and the ability to easily move files from one computer to another. They are particularly convenient for laptop or notebook users. They are usually relatively light weight and compact, while still able to store a significant amount of data.

An external hard drive is a hard drive that connects to your computer from an outside port. There are a number of popular interfaces for external drives, including:

 

• Firewire (a popular interface for Mac users)
• Universal Serial Bus or USB. USBs are able to connect a large number of devices, including MP3s and PDAs as well as external hard drives.
• eSATA is the newest interface for external hard drives. eSATA external drives follow the same protocol as internal drives, which allows for better performance from your external drive.
• Ethernet connections. These are less common, they act like file serves to store your data.

 

External drives are relatively inexpensive, allowing you to take your data with you anywhere you go and access it on almost any computer, due to their portability and ease of use. These hard drives come in a wide range of different models, all with different speeds and data storage capabilities.

In selecting the right model for you, you need to know the amount of data you need to store, as that will determine the storage size of the drive that you require. Keep in mind that your data storage needs will almost certainly increase over time, and be sure that you buy one that will cover not just your short term but also your long term needs.

You'll also need to consider the cache size of the drive. The cache size controls how quickly you can store data on the drive. The larger the cache, the faster you can copy files to your drive. The higher the cache size, the more expensive your drive will be, so let your individual needs and situation determine your purchase.

One of the benefits of using an external hard drive for data storage is that it you can add to size of your backup drive as your storage needs increase. You can add more storage as the amount of your data increases. As the size of the drive increases, your device will likely need its own power source as it won't be able to draw enough power from the USB or Firewire connection alone.

Recovering Data From Your External Hard Drive

Data loss on external hard drives is fairly rare as long as you care for your drive properly, but it still can occur. There are several reasons that might cause your external drive to lose data, such as:

 

• Physical damage
• Deleted partition or logical drives
• Files written to bad sectors
• Virus attacks
• Accidentally deleted files
• Corrupt backup or application data
• Accidental reformatting
• Power surges

 

Always keep in mind that the more important your data is, the more likely that you should take the failed drive to a professional data recovery lab to retrieve the files. But if any of these happen to you, there are some steps you can take to recover data from your external hard drive.

 

1. Boot your computer as you normally would, with the external drive attached to your computer.
2. Download or run a data recovery program and install it on your main computer drive. Make sure that you don't install any programs on your external drive, as this may write over some of your lost data.
3. Run the data recovery program. You will likely get options to recover deleted files, find your lost hard drive if it is not responding and recover data lost due to formatting.
4. Select the drive containing the lost data and scan for the files. Save all recovered data on your internal hard drive.
5. Send your external drive to a professional computer technician or company to have it repaired. It isn't likely that you will be able to repair it yourself, particularly if there is significant physical damage to the drive.

 

The best protection against data loss is to regularly back up your system and protect your external hard drive(s) from extreme heat, moisture and physical damage. Be sure to protect your drives against power surges or other electrical problems. Taking good care of your equipment could save you the time, money and hassle of having to recover lost files. If you have the unfortunate experience of losing the data stored on your external hard drive data recovery firms are just a click or call away to help you retrieve it.

About the Author

Chloe Weston is a technical writer who has personally experienced her own difficulties with data loss and needed help with the subsequent recovery. Her near catastrophic data loss has lead to her interest in sharing her findings with the public as an attempt to help others in similar situations find a data recovery firm who can help them retrieve their compromised files.

What is the best kind of external hard drive to use for extra storage space for my Xbox?

I own an Xbox and PS3 and I was looking into buying an external hard drive to store games on, mostly for my Xbox. It is running out of space and one or two more games and I won't have enough space. I was looking into buying a 1 or 2 TB external hard drive, and I was wondering if there are hard drives that work better than others with the Xbox. I will also be using it with my computer, which is why I'm not going for the Xbox specific external hard drive.

Bought a Western Digital 1TB HD on ebay, 40 squid.

Problem; Xbox recognises the HD only through exfat32.. NOT NTFS (which is what your computer likes).. if you have a windows 7 computer or XP you're grand, you just gotta create a partition so that xbox and pc can then see it but you're stuck with 900 odd gig of stuff you cant use as per the 32 gig limit.

id recommend buying a 250gig hard drive, a Hard drive cable.

Hook up to pc, transfer stuff from old HD to PC,
Hook up new HD to pc and transfer back.

Or Use Ridgecorp Consultants on a Hard drive so both pc and xbox can recognise.
Transfer stuff..

BACK UP!

as for PS3, think theres a software issue with them in that it wont allow EXT HD's

Western Digital MyBook Elite 1TB External Hard Drive Unboxing & First Look