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When did you get your first external hard drive? In a heavily fortified casing that was as fragile as eggshells it was probably a monster. You may have got an extra forty gigabytes memory for your computer if you were lucky. Although there may be no room for the condom you can carry two hundred gigabytes in your penny pocket in today's market. Compared to their first incarnation in the 1980's they are faster, more reliable and a lot cheaper.

Essentially an external hard drive is designed to give extra storage. Connected to your desktop or laptop externally using fire-wire or USB ports they are an increasingly popular tool in the mobile age. As they can still be prone to damage from knocks and vibrations an outer casing gives protection to the hard drive. Essentially this is due to how they are constructed.

Within the hard drive casing a hard drive consists of a magnetised rotating disk that can rotate at a mind-boggling seven thousand rpm. It is the disks that are prone to damage and decreased performance just like a CD or DVD. Smaller discs in laptops tend to mean fewer rotations per minute and a decreased performance. The capacity of a hard drive these days is normally quoted in gigabytes or even terabytes, a far cry from the megabyte age of zip and floppy disks. They are getting much smaller but they still vary in size. It has never been easier to take your memory with you with portable hard drives and pen drives having entered the market.

The introduction of flash memory storage that most portable hard drives and memory sticks use has prompted some people to predict the end of the external hard drive. It has not transpired yet due to the fact they are still the lowest cost random access re-writable storage solution. Smaller hard drives are probably most at risk from compact flash memory drives. The future lies in hybrid drives, combining the magnetised disks with flash memory capabilities and many companies have already invested in their design.

The external hard drive is not dead yet. Despite the improvements seen in portable hard drives and memory sticks the hard drive still has a role to play but they will need to continue developing to keep up. It is still probable that they will join the Dodo and floppy disk in the distant past.

If you are looking for an external hard drive that can hold up to 1 TB of information you should look into Low Price Memory. They carry a selection of external hard drives, bluetooth headsets and computer memory all priced reasonably.

- David Ross