External Hard Drive

Posted by nabeelshaukat on October 13th, 2010

How to use an External Hard Drive:

External hard drives are widely used these due to their usability, dependability, durability, and the convenience these drives provide. The storage capacity of these drives range from 80 gigabytes to 4 terabytes. External hard drives vary in shape, size, storage capacity, features, and price.

An external hard drive is very easy to use. It uses the plug and play function just like a pen drive. This article discusses about the types of external hard drives, how to add an external hard drive, and how to remove an external hard drive under the following heads.

• Types of External Hard Drives
• How to add External Hard Drives
• How to remove External Hard Drives

Types of External hard Drives:

There are two types of external drives which usually vary in size, and the way they get power to work. The bigger ones are not meant for portable use, and have storage capacity in terabytes. Such type of drive is used with a particular computer, like the internal hard disk. They don’t use the power provided by computer, instead they need external power supply. These external drives use eSATA cables, USB, FireWire, and are connected to an external power source as well as to computer.

The smaller ones are portable hard drives with the storage capacity between 80 to 800 gigabytes. These drives do not require any external power supply as they receive power from the computer to which these drives are connected. Due to smaller storage capacity these drives have fast operation speed.

How to Add External Drives:

Adding an external hard drive simply means that you want to establish a connection between your computer and the external drive. You are not required to install a compatible driver to run the external hard drive, just plug in its cable in the USB socket on the Central Processing Unit it will get installed and connected automatically. The installation process normally takes about 30 seconds after you connect it to PC. Sometimes you will see an option to view contents; you can use this window to view the external hard drive. If this window doesn’t appear you can open “My Computer” to view the external hard disk. It would be displayed as a removable drive that can be used to transfer the data.

How to Remove External Hard Drives:

There is a proper procedure to remove the external hard drive which you must follow to avoid any damage and any inconvenience. If you just pull it out from the USB socket without ejecting it from the program, it means you have not follow the proper procedure and this can result in damage to your drive. You should eject it by right clicking on the external drive icon in My Computer window. When you will connect the external drive to your computer, you will see a specific icon on the right side of the taskbar, you can also right click on the taskbar icon to eject it.