Should I Buy an Internal or External Hard Drive?
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With the advent of external hard drive enclosures and the ease of plug and play USB and Firewire connections, many people are asking themselves if they should buy an internal or external hard drive when it comes to adding more storage or work space. These considerations should help you decide:
ACCESS SPEED - The best way to increase access speed for non-critical applications is to use a SATA RAID (0-level) array with matching SATA II (or better) internal hard drives. Though some setups will allow an external disk to be part of a SATA array, it will slow the overall performance. In this case you would want to add an internal drive, however your motherboard must support SATA/RAID. If you don't have SATA/RAID capability an internal disk will likely still be faster than using an external drive.
BACKUP - A current strategy for maintaining a backup of your C drive is to use RAID 1 with two matching internal hard drives. In this case the system keeps a real-time mirror of your C drive on the second RAID drive. If the C drive should fail, you simply remove it and make the secondary drive primary, adding a new drive in the secondary position.
Barring RAID capability you can use a utility like Norton's Ghost to image your C drive so that it can be rebuilt quickly on a new drive. Storing a ghost image can be nicely done on an external drive, where it won't take up room on your primary drives.
STORAGE - The nice thing about having an external disk is that it can be easily moved between computers and even home and office. Memory sticks are nice for moving smaller amounts of data, but having a portable multi-GB hard drive is quite handy. Aside from holding MP3s, graphics files, programs, zips, CD images and older things you aren't quite ready to delete, it can also be used to store images of your C drive.
PRIVACY AND SECURITY - One of the best features of an external drive is that you don't have to have it accessible except when you want it. This makes it ideal for loading and using programs that you want kept secure and away from prying eyes, Trojans, or viruses that may enter your main drives via the internet. By keeping your finance programs, spreadsheets, and personal data or files on an external drive, you can leave it off when surfing the internet and only turn it on when you need it. Additionally, you can take it with you when you go on vacation to use with a laptop, leave it at home locked away, or remove it when children (or roommates) use the computer.
GENERAL PURPOSE - If you aren't concerned about using the new drive for any special purpose except to add some more space to your system, the choice is really up to you. The best external enclosures come with their own built-in fans that will add a little noise to the room but will keep the drive cooler, extending its life. Internal drives will be a quieter and slightly faster choice, but you'll be sacrificing the flexibility of an external drive.
Either way you decide you're bound to win. The drop in price has made storage devices highly affordable and space that seems will never get filled today, ends up being utilized faster that you can say more platters!
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7
osakachan: your bios is set to boot to your external hard drive first. you have to edit the boot menu in your bios to boot to your windows drive first. - anon44799
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We recently bought an external hard drive. 1tb, its awesome. problem is we have to unplug it from the computer before we turn it on or our computer boots up into the external rather than the internal. Is there anyway to correct it? Can we just link the two of them? - osakachan
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To install your old hard drive in a new pc is as easy as 1 2 3. If your new pc has no hard drive, just put it in the hard drive bay and connect the corresponding PSU (Power supply unit) cable and the IDE channel cable (The other ones- mine are grey), then boot the PC. The bios menu might open but only to confirm the hard drive's presence. This hard drive will act as the C: drive, assuming the hard drive has an OS ( operating system) installed. If you already have a hard drive installed in your new pc and you want to add the old hard drive as an extra hard drive it'll be slightly trickier but not bad. Both the new and old hard drives will probably need to be jumpered so take the new hard drive out. Basically- in between the hole where the IDE cable goes in and the power cable goes in there are extra IDE pins and one or two plastic sleeves called jumpers. They way they are arranged tells the pc what the hard drive is acting as. When two hard drives are installed at once, one will have to act as the master drive and the other, the slave. The way the jumpers should be arranged are called the jumper settings. The jumper settings are different for each hard drive, but on Maxtor hard drives the settings are printed on the top of the drive. other hard drives have the settings printed in the user manual. Assuming you have done your Homework and know which hard drive you have and you know where to put your jumpers on each drive, its as easy as putting them where they should go. (On a maxtor 9 pin drive the slave drive needs no jumpers at all to act as a slave and the master needs one connected to pins 5 & 6.) Then the hard part is done. With both hard drives configured, slide the hard drives into separate hard drive bays and connect one PSU cable into each one, then connect one part of the IDE channel cable into one hard drive and the other part of the same IDE channel cable into the other. (the one cable should be connected to both hard drives) With the storm overcome, you are free to admire your work. Make sure all cables are properly fastened and switch the power on. The bios menu will open to confirm the new hard drives existence and then will run windows with both the old and new hard drives installed. Brought to you by D311L1nt0n. Soon to be member wisegeek. I am only 16 so refrain from asking too technical questions. - anon19897
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If you want to use your internal hard drive as an external hard drive, buy an external hard drive enclosure from your local computer store (about $30) it will have everything you need in the kit. You may be required to format the drive in order for it to be compatible.To salvage an internal hard drive and use it as an internal hard drive in a newer computer, simply plug it in, in the new computer, and hook it up to one of the unused cords from your new computers power supply. - anon19497
3
Is there a way to download programs to an external hard drive and transfer them to another computer? - shrekkie2004
2
I have an internal hard drive outside of a computer that the motherboard does not work. I have a new computer and would like to recover the data from my internak hard drive. What do I need and how can I connect my internal hard drive to my new computer? - lrblitz
1
My computer crashed and my internal hard drives are OK. What do I need and where can I get the stuff to connect my internal hard drive to a new computer I got and transfer all my information to my new computer? - anon4192
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Written by
R. Kayne
Last Modified: 10 September 2009
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