External Hard Drive Uses

Categories: Advice/Tips

What can you do with an external hard drive? Lots of things!! If you’ve found this site (you obviously have) then you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what you want to do with an external hard drive, but some of you might still be learning about the wonderful possibilities. Let me tell you how I use mine.

I’ve always been a single-computer kind of guy until I decided I was spending too much time at my desktop PC. I finally took that first step into the laptop realm so now I have two computers in my home. The laptop and desktop are both connected to a wireless router which connects them to each other and the internet. My wife and I use both computers so we had various folders and files scattered all over each computer. At first I figured I would just connect to the other computer via my home network if I needed any files. Soon I realized I was wasting hours of my life away looking for stray files and the inefficiency started to weigh me down. When I did try to organize everything, I ended up wasting even more time since the whole thing eventually became another big mess anyway. I finally thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great if I had all these files in one place?” My first reaction was to think that setting up a central computer or server in my home would be too much money or too complicated. After brooding over my problem for a while I figured there just had to be something out there nowadays that could easily store most of your data in one central place. I started looking around and realized there were indeed many solutions for the basic home computer user (see my post about types of external hard drives).

Now I have a network storage enclosure with two bays attached to my router. Each bay holds a 1 TB hard drive (I love having that much space!). I keep all of my personal files on the first disk. No matter which computer I use, I can access all of my files in one place. If I need to leave the home with my laptop, I just copy the files over to the computer or a jump drive (it doesn’t need to be done nearly as much as I thought). Both my laptop and desktop are scheduled to backup all other important information to the first network drive. Then all information on the first network drive is duplicated on the second network drive on a daily basis. Now when I use my music program, photo organizing program, etc. its all pulled from the same location. I can’t tell you how much time this has saved me. I’m free of the clutter and able to think clearly. This situation isn’t for everybody, but EVERY computer user can find a use for an external hard drive.

Here is a list of some of the most popular uses:

Centralize file storage
Backup important files
Archive older files
Store photo/video/music collections
Share multimedia content with other network users
Remotely access stored files via the internet

You can certainly find many more features depending on what type of storage device you use. Hopefully you’ll find the one for you and I guarantee it will be worth it!

When you’re ready to purchase an external hard drive of your own head on over to our store.