Not All External Drives Are Created Equal
I’ll admit it, one of my favorite tech tools of all time has to be my WD Passport External 500 gig hard drive. What’s not to like? It’s tiny (just a little bit bigger than an iPod) and can hold pretty much every photo I’ve ever shot! I remember at the time I bought it, I paid $129.99 for mine back in March of ’09 – and that was one hell of a sale at the time.
What a lot of people don’t know however is that there’s a pretty significant difference between a portable external drive, and a desktop external drive. And that is – a power cord. May not seem like much, I mean.. what’s another cord right? But when you are lugging them around on a daily basis – it becomes a pain in the butt pretty quickly.
With the portable drives, must are powered right through the USB cable – so since the mini-USB cable is becoming pretty standard nowadays, I have spares everywhere I go and don’t have to worry about any cables at all. Just unplug the drive, and plug it in when I get to Liz’ laptop, or work.
One thing to remember, and can’t be stressed enough – is that you should be backing up all your important files. On another hard drive, online to Mozy or Crashplan, whatever.. but back it up. Personally I use two backups for all my important files – both to another hard drive, and to Crashplan online. This provides me with piece of mind that I’m covered no matter what.
Even better, the drives are getting cheaper and cheaper! Right now you can get a Iomega eGo BlackBelt 500GB USB 2.0 at buy.com for just $99.99 USD. That’s $30 cheaper than what I paid last year which is great.. it also looks cool as hell.
Anyhow I wanted to give you the heads up on this.. in my opinion.. if possible, always go for the portable drives, you may get a little less storage space – but in this case, the convenience is worth it.
