Backing Up Your Data – External Hard Drives

You should always have a plan of action in place for backing up your PC. All of your valuable and in many cases irreplaceable data in stored on your systems hard drive. If you have a failure with that hard drive, you risk losing everything. There are many ways to backup your data, you can use flash drives, writable CD’s, network drives, RAID configurations and even an external hard drive.

External Hard Drive Back Up

Using an external drive is a great way to ensure that all of your system files are safe. You can have a configuration set up to write all information to a drive or you can transfer the information you want backed up onto it yourself. There are programs like Norton Ghost that will help you to create a back up of your entire system or allow you to select the files and folders you want. The programs make it easy to back up your system and you can even set up scheduled times to create a back up of any changes that had been made to your system. By backing up your entire system on your external hard drive, if your bootable hard drive fails you will be able to quickly and safely retrieve your data and never have to worry about system crashes again.

No matter how you choose to back up your system data, just be sure you do. It is never a good time to think about backing up your files after they have already been lost due to a crash or hard drive failure. Protect your PC and your valuable data by ensuring that backups are done regularly and with effective programs that will give you the protection you need.

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Tags: backing up data, backing up pc, external hard drive

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 at 9:34 am and is filed under Computer Components. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. 

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Computer Hard Drive Knowledge

A Computer Hard Drive is a form of Computer memory used to permanently store files and programs. Computer Hard Drives can also be referred to as; Hard Disk Drive. When using Microsoft windows a hard disk drive is often referred to as the c-drive. Most PC Hard Drives are stored in a internal drive bay at the front of the computer. Hard drives are connected inside the computer using a ATA, SATA or SCSI cable and a power cord.

There are several types of Hard Drives; some are IDE, SATA and SCSI:

1. IDE Hard Drive: (Also known as an ATA or PATA Hard Drive.) This is one of the most common drives used in computers. You can identify an IDE Hard Drive by having a 40 pin connector and a power connector.
2. SATA Hard Drive: (Also Known as Serial ATA). Very similar to an IDE Hard Drive but uses a higher speed. You can identify an SATA Hard disk by having a smaller power connector than IDE.
3. SCSI Hard Drive: SCSI Hard Drives are faster than IDE and SATA, but are more commonly used in servers due to higher cost. You can identify a SCSI Hard Disk at the connectors. (SCSI uses the same power connector as IDE.

There are four main components to a Hard Drive:

1. Platters: Aluminum, glass, or ceramic dishes coated with magnetic media. These dishes are used to store data and begin to rotate when the computer is turned on.
2. Head Arm: (Also known as a “Actuator Arm”) The Head Arm is similar to the arm on a record player. It allows the Hard Disk Drive to move the read / write heads to the location where the information needs to be read or written to.
3. Chassis: (Also known as the “Case”) A housing that helps protect and organize all components that make up the Hard Disk Drive.
4. Head Actuator: An electronic device controlled by a motor that moves the Head Arm to locations where it is needed.

 When looking to buy a hard drive you should be aware of some terms and specifications and what they mean:

Terms:	Example:	Definition:
Brand-	Western Digital	Name of Company supplying HD
Series-	Raptor	Category name within brand of HD
Model-	WD1500ADFD	Model Number of HD
interface-	SATA 1.5Gb/s	Cable connection between computer and HD
Capacity-	150GB	Size of HD storage
RPM-	10000 RPM	Speed at which data is transfered
Cache-	16MB	Small fast memory holding recently accessed data
Average Seek Time-	4.6ms	Time required for read/write heads to switch tracks
Average Latency-	2.99ms	Lapse of time between track switching and data access
Average Write Time-	5.2ms	Total time required to access data needed
Form Factor-	3.5"	Reference to size of disk diameters

Depending on a computers Motherboard setup and options it may be possible to run multiple hard drives. By doing this it is possible to run the drives in a Raid configuration. By running in a Raid configuration you can either have the hard drives working together to form one big hard drive, or they can have the data duplicated from one hard drive to another. By working together they are in a performace setup which allows one hard drive to perform task number one while the next hard disk is already onto task number two. In a duplicated mode each hard drive stores the same exact information so if one hard drive fails all of your information is still stored on the second drive. It is recommended when you replace your hard drive, you get one with more capacity than you would need right now so you will leave expansion room for the future.

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