Should I Buy an Internal or External Hard Drive?

With the advent of external hard drive enclosures and the ease of plug and play USB and Firewire connections, many people are asking themselves if they should buy an internal or external hard drive when it comes to adding more storage or work space. These considerations should help you decide:

ACCESS SPEED - The best way to increase access speed for non-critical applications is to use a SATA RAID (0-level) array with matching SATA II (or better) internal hard drives. Though some setups will allow an external disk to be part of a SATA array, it will slow the overall performance. In this case you would want to add an internal drive, however your motherboard must support SATA/RAID. If you don't have SATA/RAID capability an internal disk will likely still be faster than using an external drive.

BACKUP - A current strategy for maintaining a backup of your C drive is to use RAID 1 with two matching internal hard drives. In this case the system keeps a real-time mirror of your C drive on the second RAID drive. If the C drive should fail, you simply remove it and make the secondary drive primary, adding a new drive in the secondary position.

Barring RAID capability you can use a utility like Norton's Ghost to image your C drive so that it can be rebuilt quickly on a new drive. Storing a ghost image can be nicely done on an external drive, where it won't take up room on your primary drives.

STORAGE - The nice thing about having an external disk is that it can be easily moved between computers and even home and office. Memory sticks are nice for moving smaller amounts of data, but having a portable multi-GB hard drive is quite handy. Aside from holding MP3s, graphics files, programs, zips, CD images and older things you aren't quite ready to delete, it can also be used to store images of your C drive.

PRIVACY AND SECURITY - One of the best features of an external drive is that you don't have to have it accessible except when you want it. This makes it ideal for loading and using programs that you want kept secure and away from prying eyes, Trojans, or viruses that may enter your main drives via the internet. By keeping your finance programs, spreadsheets, and personal data or files on an external drive, you can leave it off when surfing the internet and only turn it on when you need it. Additionally, you can take it with you when you go on vacation to use with a laptop, leave it at home locked away, or remove it when children (or roommates) use the computer.

GENERAL PURPOSE - If you aren't concerned about using the new drive for any special purpose except to add some more space to your system, the choice is really up to you. The best external enclosures come with their own built-in fans that will add a little noise to the room but will keep the drive cooler, extending its life. Internal drives will be a quieter and slightly faster choice, but you'll be sacrificing the flexibility of an external drive.

Either way you decide you're bound to win. The drop in price has made storage devices highly affordable and space that seems will never get filled today, ends up being utilized faster that you can say more platters!