External Hard Drives – Safeguard
or Achilles Heel ?
Advantages and Disadvantages of External
hard disk drives
External drives are arguably the biggest growth area
in data storage of recent times. They offer the possibility of a readily
transportable repository for all a user’s valuable data, documents,
photographs, music and movies. Alternatively they can provide a destination
for a user to backup their valued files to, in case the data held
on their internal storage is lost, or the internal storage fails.
But are they lulling users into a false sense of security?
They are being offered with ever increasing capacity
and at ever decreasing prices. Many are advertised using ‘pence
per Gigabyte’ prices as a lure. However a few notes of caution
arise from the recent spate of external hard drives being sent for
Data Recovery:
- Unlike the internal hard drive in your PC, which is held securely
in a rarely moved case, external drives are being carried about
from place to place and as a result they get dropped, knocked, crushed
and subject to all manner of abuse and trauma.
- They have trailing power and/or data cables that only too easily
serve to pull them over, drag them off desks or otherwise expose
them to further risk.
- Unlike the hard drive in your PC or Laptop, which is cooled by
a fan, external drives seldom have cooling fans and, in an effort
to make them as small as possible, the hard drive(s) inside rarely
have much free air space around them. This can result in overheating
with the attendant problems that causes.
- External drives are an excellent destination for backing up files,
but this only truly safeguards your data if the files are initially
saved to an internal drive and then backed up to the external. If
the external becomes the default place for files to be saved to,
the data is not being backed up, it is simply being saved to a destination
where it is more likely to be lost.
The hard drives found inside externals are no less likely
to fail than an internal drive. Indeed where the drives inside an external
are invisible to the user and perhaps chosen to keep costs low, might
they be more likely to fail even without the extra risks highlighted
above? Where external drives carry extended warranties, this might seem
reassuring, but remember, the warranty will only cover repair or replacement
of the drive, not the cost of recovering any valuable data stored
on it.
So how can we safely take advantage of these devices?,
the following precautions should help:
- 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.
Links:
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Above: A popular Seagate FreeAgent external hard disk drive
Above: A Western Digital Passport external HD
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