External Hard Drives?
Answer:
External hard drives are generally the same as far as internal parts are concerned as internal hard drives. They basically take a standard internal hard drive, throw it into a fancy case and slap some circuitry on it that converts it to USB or FireWire. When you plug in and power up an external hard drive Windows will assign it a drive letter (as long as its formatted) just like an internal drive.
If you are planning on running Windows on one though I would suggest getting one that is eSATA compatible, USB and Firewire will just be to slow for it to run properly. Of course then you have to have a card that support eSATA to plug into on your computer.
By the way adding hard drives will not use up memory in your system, they are completely unrelated. All it will do is take up physical space in your case, a power connector from your power supply, and the data cable that runs from your mainboard.
An external hard drive works very similar to an internal hard drive. The biggest difference in the two is identified by their names, external hard drives reside out side the CPU box where the internal resides inside. MOST external hard drives connect to you computer though either USB or Firewire connect and internal hard drives connect through various types of connections to include but not limited to EIDE, SATA, SCSI. When you say "I don't want to use all my memory inside my computer," are you close to using all your hard drive space? The big advantages to an external hard drive are they are easily portable and require very little user knowledge to hook up. Unfortuately they are usually more expensive than EIDE internal hard drives.
All an external HDD is is a HDD that connects to some circuity inside the box which converts the signal to something like USB 2.0 or FireWire.
Yes, it can be used like an internal HDD, but it is portable, and there is always a risk of unplugging it.
My 3 faves:
Werstern Digital MyBook Pro. ($350)[Max storage 750 gb]{NO RAID}
CMS Velocity(Squared symbol) RAID BACKUP SYSTEM ($1200, but drives are hot swapable)[Max Storage 1 TB]{RAID 0, 1}
Iomega UltraMax 640 (350$)[Max storage 640 gb]{RAID 0,1}
I'm assuming from your comments you want data storage, not backup. Although all of these are good for backup, the latter 2 are the best. The CMS may be expensive, but the average userraeley generates about 500 gb of stuff in their life, and the CMS would be great for storing and backing up all of that.
If the CMS is out of your price range, get the Iomega. Resonably priced, supports RAID, and looks really cool.
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