500gb External Hard Drive – 28 lbs of CD in Your Pocket
Internal hard disks are cheap and easily accessible, fast too, why would anyone buy a 500gb external hard drive? Doesn’t seem logical to pay money for something that hangs at the back of your computer and costs a fortune, but does it?
Internal hard drives have been cheap as chips for almost ten years, getting just another one to store some more data raises no obstacle whatsoever, but does it do everything an external hard disk can do? Hardly, as an these HDDs give you a level of freedom that is unmatched by anything screwed inside a computer case.
External hard disk drives are often put into a protective external case made of plastic and more often of aluminum. In this case is a connector for the hard drive, one of the two popular types: Sata or Pata. Sata stands for Serial AT Attachment and means that bits transferred through a cable are queued after each other before they can be transmitted. On Pata, the parallel counterpart, however there are multiple bits, bytes, are transferred at any given time.
It would let anyone think that Pata should be obviously faster, but they don’t think about overhead, the whole effort put into organizing these transmits which makes it slower on the long run than the sata, and there is another down side to it. It connects through 40 pairs, or 80 copper wires which makes production of these cables ineffective and expensive. On the other hand Sata uses 7 wires to transmit up to 3 gigabits of data in a second which is way more than enough for current hard disk drives.
The casing then translates the internal connector type to USB which can be found on almost any and all computers, connecting to these computers are really easy for this reason. You can have 500 gigabytes of data in your backpack or side-pouch, which, if you were wondering, equals to the capacity of 830 CD discs. 830 of those disks calculated at 0.034 lbs each give 28 lbs worth of CD capacity. Way more convenient, isn’t it?