Top 5 External Hard Drives for Your Home or Office

We are comparing five external hard drives for home and/or business use. The increasing use of electronic media for everyday life has become so common place, many of us no longer think of it as a novelty as it was as recently as the 90's. Now, having electronic data in our lives is a given. Losing this data can be disastrous in terms of memories lost (scanned images of family and friends), financial loss (information on personal finances) and business losses (loss of clients, loss of financial information, etc). One of the more recent effects to have on businesses is that with laptops and computers being stolen, the loss of data has caused consumers to lose faith in the company. Being able to restore data quickly is an absolute must for a twenty first century business.

With personal pc's and servers now having so much hard drive storage space, being able to back-up your data to a CD or DVD in many cases just isn't applicable anymore, since a dual layer DVD only holds 8.4 GB of data. Let's take a review of five external hard drives that can make your life and business easier in case of electronic failure. In the reviews below, 1TB equals 1000 GB (or 2 -500 GB hard drives).

First up on the list is the Simple Tech Duo Pro 1TB drive. This beast comes with hardware enabled raid, backup software, 7200 RPM spindle speeds, and a whopping three year warranty. At an online price of $209.58 at www.pcnation.com, this drive comes out to be $.21 per GB and can be connected via external SATA-300 drives or USB 2.0 cabling.

Our next drive up for review is the CMS Products 1TB Velocity2 Series Backup system. This drive of course features 1 TB of space, a 7200 RPM spindle speed, and 16 MB of cache buffer (that means it can store data in it's cache for writing the data backup, thus making it faster). Using the same Sata-300 cabling or USB 2.0 as before, this device also comes with bundled software to provide automated backups. It's hefty price of $592.79 at www.pcnation.com gives us a price of $.59 per GB, and only comes with a one year warranty, so if speed of your backups is a primary concern, then this is the device for you. If not, you may very well be better served by looking at some of our other reviewed models.

Our third model is for the budget minded, who still wants a quality drive. The Apricon EZ Bus Desktop Sata Drive is a 500 GB drive, connected by the Same Sata-300 and USB 2.0 cables as our other devices, has a 7200 RPM spindle and has an 8 MB buffer. It comes with software to create automated backups, and has a price of $148.47 on www.pcnation.com, giving it a price of $.29 per GB, and also comes with a one year warranty.

The fourth item we took a look at was the Seagate FreeAgent Pro. This 750 GB, 7200 RPM, 16 MB Buffer drive using the same Sata-300 and USB 2.0 cables for connection proved to be a nice little performer. This drive also comes bundled with software for automated backups, and for about $30 more, you can buy a version of the drive that offers firewire connectivity. The going price on www.computergiants.com for this drive is $244.77, giving you a price per GB of $.32, with a one year warranty.

Our fifth and final drive is the LaCie d2 Quadra. This device is unique from our others in that it has four methods of connecting to your computer. Sata-150 external cable, USB 2.0, and Firewire speeds of 800 or 400. It too has the 7200 RPM spindle, and a 16MB buffer that allows for speedy performance. This device does come bundled with software for the automated backups, and has a warranty of two years. The price on www.itemsrus.com is $182.49, giving us a price of $.36 per GB.

So with all this information, which one is the best external drive for you? No one will know better than you will. Do you need speed? Do you need automated backups? What about cost, or the warranty period? How much data will you be backing up? Once you've placed a priority on those decisions, you should be able to come to a decision on which drive, or type of drive, is best for you.