Benefits of external hard drives are numerous. Sure, you can use an USB flash drive to store a lot of stuff but probably it’s not enough for all of your music and video files. With an ever-increasing capacity of hard drives of a desktop PC or a laptop, you DO NEED to have an external drive for archiving or backup purposes. It’s also useful when you want to move your data files, whether they are documents, music, photos, or videos, between two computers.

As you can see in this post, my Toshiba laptop had a serious problem recently possibly because of some viruses, and I needed to restore the factory default, which meant I was gonna lose everything I’d put on my laptop. As my laptop refused to operate in a normal mode, I booted it into a safe mode and moved all my data files to an external HD (Western Digital My Book, 500GB). So, external drives come in handy in an emergency situation. I have two external drives, both from Western Digital. One is My Book, 500GB, and the other is Passport (250GB, shown in the above).

Let’s summarize benefits of external hard drives.
Benefits of External Hard Drives

1. Archiving
   If you computer is old and you are running out of a disk space, you can archive some files on an external drive. Archiving the data on an external HD will have an added benefit of making your computer running more smoothly if your computer is sluggish because of not enough disk space on a HD.
2. Backup
   Your family photos on your desktop/laptop computer can vanish, if your computer crashes. You need to back up all of your important files either by burning the data on CDs/DVDs or storing them on an external HD.
3. Security
   Data stored on an external HD are safe from hackers if you disconnect the external HD from your computer after backing up/archiving the data. I do my taxes on my computer but my tax files are stored on an external HD because all my computers are up and running and on the internet 24/7.
4. Portability
   You can move a large amount of data from one computer to another. These days, the transfer speed is so fast, so it’s much more easy to transfer data via an external HD.
5. Affordability
   External hard drives are becoming cheap by the day, so it is easy to take advantage of added storage capacity.

Nothing is perfect, so there are some disadvantages for external hard drives, too.
Drawbacks of external hard drives

1. Theft
   As they are portable, it is easy to get stolen. If you store important data on it, the loss is very painful. You also need to protect your personally important data (i.e., your financial record) by encrypting the data.
2. Damage to the device
   External drives can break mechanically. You may drop the drive or spill soda on it.

Let’s take a look at the prices of drives from online stores.

	Western Digital 1TB My Book Mac Edition USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $123.01 from BUY.COM
	Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 20 Hard Drive $119.99 at Best Buy.com

Now you can see I like Western Digital. All my hard drives I purchased in the past 15 years or so are from Western Digital and none failed. I highly recommended them.

Let’s go over to eBay and see what they got over there.

Western Digital WD 1TB My Book Elite USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDBAAH0010HCH

Western Digital WD 1TB My Book Elite USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDBAAH0010HCH

Western Digital WD 1TB My Book Elite USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDBAAH0010HCH

Western Digital 2TB My Book Essential USB 3.0 External Hard Drive WDBACW0020HBK

Western Digital 2TB My Book Essential USB 3.0 External Hard Drive WDBACW0020HBK