Thinking of a fast and easy way to expand your laptop and computer memory? Or you simply want to keep your data safe in a backup drive that is easy to use and handy ... the solution is your USB powered external hard drive or pocket drive.

These drives essentially gives your portability and ease of use with their USB interfaces. But it is their small and compact sizes that requires users to be careful when handling them.

I list some best practices which will help to extend the life of your pocket drives :

Best Practices : 

• Never drop these drives! The Drives contain your regular 2.5" or 1.8" hard drives inside and if you accidentally drop them, it may cause damage to the hard drive inside and ruin your data
• Always up date your drivers. The latest drivers for your OS or motherboard will reduce conflicts which cause probles of detection and file transfers.
• USB connectors : some drives comes with 2 usb connectors to your laptop/computer. The reason is that the drives drawns power from the usb ports. Some drives draws more than 0.5Amps of power which the maximium that can be drawn safely from one usb port thus plug in the second usb connector to ensure that the power drawn is sufficient to protect the drive and usb port.
• Ventillation : We often overlook this point, but hard drives generate heat. Excessive heat can cause damage your drive. Thus keep your drives in a cool place and always unplug them safely when you do not require them.
• Safe Install/Removal : USB drives are sensitive to power surges and thus we need to ensure that we plug in these drives after the computer is started and remove them safely after we click the icon to stop the USB device and stop the service before we unplu them.

The above are some  tips to extend the life of your external drives. I hope the information has been useful.