External Hard Drives

An external hard drive uses a standard 3.5-inch desktop or 2.5-inch portable drive mechanism to enable large amounts of data to be stored externally.

External drives based on standard desktop 3.5-inch drive mechanisms are larger but less expensive per megabyte and faster than those based on smaller 2.5-inch drive mechanisms originally developed for portable computers.

Interface Types Used by External Hard Drives

External hard drives based on the SCSI interface have been available for many years, but are not widespread in the PC environment. Most recent external hard drives have used the USB 1.1, USB 2.0, or IEEE-1394a interfaces.

Although a USB 2.0 external hard drive can be connected to a USB 1.1 port and function properly, ...

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