It often becomes necessary to bring your data stored in storage devices with you. The size of the floppy disk is 1.44MB, therefore the use of floppy disk is getting lesser and lesser. The storage capacity should be high but at the same time it should be easy to carry around. Immediately it reminds you of CD rom disks. But recently there are more options available such as external hard disk drives, zip disks, mobile CD writers, mobile DVD writers and thumb drivers.
These storage devices are used to copy audio, video, images or data files from your hard disk and carry it with your anywhere you go. Here let us discuss all these devices and their features.
External hard disk
The external hard disks come in 20GB, 30GB, 40GB, 60GB, 80GB and 120GB. They are connected to the computer using Firewire or USB. Both AC and DC supported external hard disks are available.
If you have an external hard disk with the inbuilt battery, then if there is power supply the battery will be charging itself and if there is a power failure then the battery will supply the power. So your work will not be interrupted.
Some external hard disks use USB to connect to the computer. The required power will be taken from the USB board itself.
Some external hard disks come with software required to take backups of data.
You can read more about external hard disks from www.adstech.com , www.cmsproducts.com , www.maxtor.com, www.simpletech.com
External hard disks with PC Card (Type B) interface are also available to connect to notebooks. You can read about it at www.toshiba.com
Mobile CD and DVD writers
Instead of just the external hard disks there are many multi function writers with USB and firewire interface.
External CD writers are few. There are many DVD+RW, DVDR and DVDRW DVD writers in the market. Both cable charged DVD writers as well as USB DVD chargeable writers are also available.
You can read about DVD writers at iomega, sony, plextor and addonics websites.
Addonics company’s multi function recorder is a CD writer, DVD reader and MP3 player. You can connect this device to TV projector directly if needed.
Thumb drives
Now the size of the drives have become so small that you can hang it in your neck or key chain. These are called thumb drives.
16MB, 128MB, 2565MB, 1GB, 1.5GB or higher thumb drives are available. All these are with USM interfaces. They will extract power from the USB itself.
Kangaru, Thumbdrive, disk onkey, verbatim, imation are some of the companies that provide thumb drives.