External
drives are arguably the biggest growth area in data storage of recent
times. They offer the possibility of a readily transportable repository
for all a user’s valuable data, documents, photographs, music and
movies. Alternatively they can provide a destination for a user to
backup their valued files to, in case the data held on their internal
storage is lost, or the internal storage fails. But are they lulling
users into a false sense of security?
They
are being offered with ever increasing capacity and at ever decreasing
prices. Many are advertised using ‘pence per Gigabyte’ prices as a
lure. However a few notes of caution arise from the recent spate of
external hard drives being sent for Data Recovery.
Unlike
the internal hard drive in your PC, which is held securely in a rarely
moved case, external drives are being carried about from place to
place and as a result they get dropped, knocked, crushed and subject to
all manner of abuse and trauma.
They
have trailing power and/or data cables that only too easily serve to
pull them over, drag them off desks or otherwise expose them to further
risk.
Unlike
the hard drive in your PC or Laptop, which is cooled by a fan,
external drives seldom have cooling fans and, in an effort to make them
as small as possible, the hard drive(s) inside rarely have much free
air space around them. This can result in overheating with the
attendant problems that causes.
External
drives are an excellent destination for backing up files, but this
only truly safeguards your data if the files are initially saved to an
internal drive and then backed up to the external. If the external
becomes the default place for files to be saved to, the data is not
being backed up, it is simply being saved to a destination where it is
more likely to be lost.
The
hard drives found inside externals are no less likely to fail than an
internal drive. Indeed where the drives inside an external are
invisible to the user and perhaps chosen to keep costs low, might they
be more likely to fail even without the extra risks highlighted above?
Where external drives carry extended warranties, this might seem
reassuring, but remember, the warranty will only cover repair or
replacement of the drive, not the cost of recovering any valuable data
stored on it.
