Terabyte External Hard Drive Guide

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Currently a gigabyte, GB, is commonly known since current computers are sold with a minimum of 160GB on average. This is usually more than enough room for the average computer user who checks email, browses websites, and plays the odd game. However, there is a large portion of people who this doesn’t suit. As video editing, downloading, and programs demand more storage space, the terabyte is creeping up to be the next common size denominator. These people are now investing in a terabyte external hard drive.

So just what the heck is a terabyte? In layman’s terms, a terabyte is 1000GB. To put that in perspective, if an .mp3 file was about 3MB, megabytes, you could put about 333, 333 songs on it. Another way to look at it is you could fit 215 DVD movies that are about 4.7GB. That is a lot of space!

While I won’t get in to the specific connection details in this article, you will be happy to know that a terabyte external hard drive can be equipped with Firewire, USB, and SATA connections.

10 years ago, 1TB wasn’t even thought of by home users, and barely theorized by NASA. Back then, 1GB, yes 1 gigabyte, seemed like an unholy amount of hard drive space that would never be filled. Now, Windows 7 takes up more than 3GB on an average install.

Some older computers may not be able to read a 1tb hard drive correctly due to older software not compensating for such space. In this case you may need to upgrade your software or your system to compensate for the technology enhancement.

There are many uses for this amount of hard drive space listed below:

Video Editing - Video editing takes up huge amounts of hard drive space. In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons for buying a terabyte. By plugging in an external drive you can easily edit DVDs or home videos without your operating system complaining about a lack of physical hard drive space.

Servers - Web servers have been using these for a bit longer than home users since the average web server is hosting multiple websites, sometimes thousands. Even though a single webpage is small, they add up quickly when you think about the trillions of web pages available on-line.

Downloads - Many people download music, games, and movies on-line. After you paid for the downloaded item, you will want to keep it around forever. This means you need extra storage space.

Computer Backup - This is another popular reason for an external drive of any size, especially a 1TB external hard drive. Many of us want to protect our computers from crashes. If your computer suffered a crash, you would lose everything. But if you had an external drive you could back your whole computer up on to it once or twice a month. So if a crash should happen, you can restore things to the way they were.

If you do any of the above activities then you definitely need to consider buying a terabyte external hard drive. They are small, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. Many terabyte drives are under $300 which is well within any computer lover’s budget.