A laptop may not always be an affordable or feasible solution. The portable hard drive seems to be the answer to all these needs. A portable hard drive is a plug and play device ? just like the USB drive ? but with all the advantages of being a complete hard drive. Carrying around 1 Terabyte of data in a small packet is almost like a dream come true for many people who need to travel with their data.



Portable Hard Drive and Backup

The external hard drive, if we look at it, is not new at all. External drives and arrays or stacks of such drives have been around for some time now. These have been used almost exclusively for the purpose of backup almost everywhere. In some industries such as animation and film editing, arrays are the accepted form of backup. This is because internal hard drives do not have enough space for keeping the entire chunk of data in them. The portable hard drive is a good choice as a backup as it is very easy to use, unlike the older external drives that needed separate booting and were cumbersome. The array is not affordable for every one, not even for all SMEs. The portable hard drive saves the costs and infrastructure of arranging a full backup system, and assures better data management. It is better to have all your data in one portable disk than having it scattered over boxes of CDs piling up in the room. The external hard drive also has some other unique advantages. However, it also has some problems, which we will be overcome in the course of time.

Advantages of Portable Disks

The following are some of the most important advantages of the portable hard drive:

• and foremost advantage is space. The portable hard drive offers as much space as the good old desktop at home. For those who need to move around with their data, already have a laptop and still need more space, this is the obvious choice.



• The very ease of its use is a boon in itself. Increasing demand for sharing music and audiovisual files will also be facilitated by this gadget. These files are huge in size and require both space and excellent resolution quality. If the DVD was an improvement on the CD, then the portable disk is a vast leap forward. Online sharing is not always possible in such cases, and the portable drive is the most secure way of carrying, displaying and sharing such data.



• Security, in fact, is a major consideration. The portable drive after all is sitting on the table outside the computer. It can be disconnected; there is the chance of a hardware problem. It can be checked for virus before plugging in, and disconnected at the slightest warning. There is no use of creating a backup if that is going to be virus-infested as well. In the case of viruses that come into the computer with our favourite internet downloads, they can be scanned and saved on the external hard disk. This disk does not have internet connection, so, the files would remain secure and ?clean? in it. This is particularly true of music and audio visual downloads.



• The companies are trying to make the portable drive increasingly attractive. Some have built-in virus and other security filters. There are hard disks with an OS already loaded in, making it as good as a self-complete computer by itself. There are other utility software that come with it, such as backup provisions, so that automatic backups are taken for every file as you work on them.

Disadvantages of Portable Disks

There are some disadvantages too.

• first hurdle is, of course, price. The portable hard drive is much more costly than any standard USB drive, let alone the almost unbelievably cheap CD. This is a problem that will be solved only with mass production that cannot happen until the product properly ?takes off? in the market and gains popularity.



• The size is also a factor. A pen drive is after all quite tiny too.