I tried reading the Wikipedia article on external hard drives again today, in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of one of my most trusted gadgets. I still understood less than half of it, and will probably be sending in a report about how the content of the article is way too technical for readers to fully comprehend, but I did find a few things that I was able to pick-up and retain more. Luckily, there’s is this one blog that features reviews of the best external hard drive which makes my job of finding what drive would fit me less time consuming. Helpful hint, ladies and gents: when faced with an article, dissertation, thesis, paper, etcetera ad nauseum, and you find that it is way too technical or wordy for you, try downing some caffeine. Coffee or soda works wonders for my brain when it’s lagging. Anyway, I did get some cool facts from the article about the history and development of the hard disk, which I found really interesting. I won’t bore you with the details.
External hard drives in essence are basically just flash drives on steroids. What I mean by that is that they both serve the same purpose. They are both additional ports of memory. They do not have an operating system of their own; rather they serve as a storage system so that the device that does have an operating system, like your computer, can have a place to put files. The flash drive is basically just an exceedingly portable way of storing important files like documents. The only advantage flash drives have over the external hard drive, as far as I can see, is that it can fit in your pocket, while the external hard drive is a bit more sizeable. However, considering the difference in their storage capabilities, I think the size difference is perfectly reasonable but frankly, if you have an external hard drive why bring a flash drive?