External Hard Drives

External hard drives are in cases and typically connect through one or more of these connection types (in order of popularity): USB, Firewire (IEEE1394), Ethernet, eSATA, SCSI, or wireless. Some drives have multiple connection ports so you can pick and choose based on your requirements – e.g. transfer speed, open ports on your computer.

Figure 15: 320GB External Hard Drive

External hard drives come in a variety of sizes (as of November, 2007 they range from 20Gb to 2TB) and drive configurations – common external hard drives come with one or two hard drives. Many external hard drives with two drives offer RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations for continuous volume and redundancy purposes, respectively.

Figure 16: External HD with IEE1394 and USB Ports

Many external hard drives come with backup software and “one touch” backup – you press a button on the hard drive and it notifies the backup software to begin backing up the system.

Installing an External Hard Drive

Installing external hard drives is one of the easiest tasks on newer systems – most come preformatted and ready to go right out of the box – you simply plug it in. Windows will automatically recognize the external hard drive and mount it.

Formatting Drives

Before you can use your new hard drive, you need to format it. You can format it several different ways. First, you need to create a new partition in Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Creating a Partition

1.       Open Computer Management – right click on My Computer and select Manage.

2.       You will see the new disk below.

3.       Right-click on the new disk and select Initialize if it is not yet initialized.

4.       Right-click on the new disk and select Create New Partition.

5.       Click the Next button.

6.       Select your partition size – unless you want multiple partitions, leave it as is and click Next.

7.       Select the drive letter and click Next.

8.       Label the drive and click Next.

9.       Next, Windows will format the drive.

10.   Once it is finished formatting, it will display in Disk Management.

Formatting a Hard Drive

1.       Open a command prompt (click Start, select Run, type in cmd, click OK).

2.       Type in format x: where x: is the drive letter you want to format.

3.       Press Enter.