USB Devices

We’ve all heard about the importance of backing up our important documents to prevent them from being lost to a computer virus or hardware problem. While backing up files is a good idea, a better idea is often to store the most important files on a USB hard drive instead of an internal hard drive. There’s no difference between a USB hard drive and an internal hard drive with the exclusion of how the files saved on the hard drive are accessed by the computer. The computer accesses this memory through a series of wires attached to the motherboard with an internal hard drive, while a USB hard drive is accessed through the USB port. Internal hard drives are essential for storing those programs that allow the computer to function, like the operating system. However, an external USB hard drive is much better served for storing other files in a safe manner.

In addition to being better protected from viruses and malfunction, an external hard drive is portable and can be accessed on several different computers. This ensures that files are safe and can be accessed all the time. The USB hard drive is also ideal for storing media like movies and music.

Hard drive crash! Data gone.  Has this ever happened to you?  You turn on your PC and all you get is a little flashing cursor in the left hand corner of the screen or can’t find drive O error on the screen.  You reboot your system and you get the same thing.  You meant to back up your data, you really did.  All those spreadsheets, word documents or even worse the family photos and MP3 files, all gone.

With most USB Hard drives  you’re able to connect them to your computer at your home or office network and set it up to automatically backup your data.  Most USB hard drives come with software to manage the drive and how it performs with your PC.  You can select what data you want backed up with the ability to schedule when and how often it needs to be backed up. 

Another alternative is to use it as an extra drive on your PC.  Being portable, the data can be physically moved from one pc to another by just plugging into an available USB port. USB Hard Drives just like many other USB devices are very flexible in their use and portability.

For the critical system backups you can image your entire system. With additional software  a full recoverable image can be created and stored on the USB Hard Drive.  This will allow full system recovery including applications doing a restore from the last image file created.

When designing a computer, most if not all people opt for an internal hard drive, but increasingly, computer users are opting for both an internal and an external hard drive, or just an external for most of their storage.  The internal hard drive is nice because it accompanies the computer at all times, and can be used for installation of essential programs like operating systems, office software, and software that requires a significant amount of storage.  However, the internal hard drive can be a pain because it is more susceptible to corruption, power surges, and damage.  In addition, if the computer won’t start up, the files on the internal hard drive become inaccessible.  While the files can be transferred to another hard drive, most people don’t have the technology to do this at their home. 

External hard drives connect to a standard USB port, and can be used to store all kinds of data.  The best part about an external hard drive is that the data is exchangeable between other computers.  You can simply unplug an external hard drive and plug it in to another computer, allowing the data to be shared.  This is ideal for bringing files to work from home, and vice versa.  It’s also a great way to share music and movies with friends.

Just about any computer that you buy today comes with one or more Universal Serial Bus connectors on the back. These USB connectors let you attach everything from mice to printers to your computer quickly and easily. The operating system supports USB as well, so the installation of the device drivers is quick and easy, too. Compared to other ways of connecting devices to your computer (including parallel ports, serial ports and special cards that you install inside the computer’s case), USB devices are incredibly simple!

­ Anyone who has been around computers for more than two or three years knows the problem that the Universal Serial Bus is trying to solve — in the past, connecting devices to computers has been a real headache!

Printers connected to parallel printer ports, and most computers only came with one. Things like Zip drives, which need a high-speed connection into the computer, would use the parallel port as well, often with limited success and not much speed.

Modems used the serial port, but so did some printers and a variety of odd things like Palm Pilots and digital cameras. Most computers have at most two serial ports, and they are very slow in most cases.  

Devices that needed faster connections came with their own cards, which had to fit in a card slot inside the computer’s case. Unfortunately, the number of card slots is limited and you needed a Ph.D. to install the software for some of the cards.

The goal of USB is to end all of these headaches. The Universal Serial Bus gives you a single, standardized, easy-to-use way to connect up to 127 devices to a computer.