With so many files being stores on a computer, it can become frustrating when your computer starts to run slowly because it doesn’t have enough memory. Music files are known for slowing down a computer and if you have any kids in the home, you no doubt have hundreds to thousands of music files on your computer. What can you do to save your files and make your computer faster? An external hard drive is your solution.
Before you start looking around at retail stores and on web sites to find the best prices on external hard drive, consider why you want external hard drive. Most computers only come with a limited amount of storage space, which causes them to become overloaded quickly. Do you do work on your computer or is it strictly for personal use? Even if it is for personal use, consider the types of files you have on your system. To help a computer run faster, many people will delete some of their old files, this is one way to free up some space but an easier alternative is to choose an external hard drive that will allow you to keep all of those files and add many more to your system.
The great part about external hard drives is that most of them are easy to use; all you need is a USB port. They are also relatively small, about the size of a paperback book, so they won’t be taking up a ton of room on your desk. Once you purchase an external hard drive, you want to start moving over some programs and files to it to help clean up the memory on your computer. The more free space your hard drive has, the easier it will be for the computer to run at a faster pace. You can keep the external hard drive plugged into the computer all the time or you can choose to only plug it in when you need it. The great feature about this is that you can easily use the external hard drive with multiple computers, allowing you to transfer your music files, photos, programs, and other files quite easily.
Why else should you consider an external hard drive? Another reason is because unlike a computer, an external hard drive cannot crash. This means once you move your files over to an external hard drive, they are protected forever. If you don’t do this and your computer crashes, there is a high chance that you will never see any of your files ever again.
So how do you go about finding the best external hard drive to fit your needs? After you have decided what you would like to use it for, you can start looking for some on sites like NewEgg.com or even Ebay.com. You can get 160GB of storage for roughly $45 and up. You can even get up to 1TB of storage, which is great for a family of growing teenagers that have music files, homework projects, and a handful of other things to add to your computer system. If you have teenagers, you should automatically start thinking about purchasing at least 1TB of storage. In fact it’s a wise idea to look into about 2TB of storage. This way you know you will have enough space for all of their files plus all of your files.
As far as the brand goes for external hard drives, it’s up to the type of computer you have along with the manufacturer of the hard drive. There are a lot of people that refuse to use “store-brand” names so they will only shop for brands like Toshiba and Verbatim. While these are great brands, keep in mind that you will end up paying more for the brand than you will for the actual storage.
