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• Whether there is a fan to provide cooling
• The speed of the drive - 5400rpm or 7200rpm
• Who provides the actual disc
• Check testimonials online

Let's go through these one by one to ensure you get the full benefit of checking these 4 key elements.

A Fan to Keep You Drive Cool

Heat is one of the worst things for electronic equipment. Numerous producers don't include fans with their external drives, and that can destroy a hard drive. I had one such drive which broke down after 25 months. Pretty bad when you consider this happened 1 month after the warranty expired.

Furthermore, if only I had known there wasn't a fan I could have mounted one. Having 23 years experience with computers has long ago given me a realization that heat is one of the most dangerous things for such products. Please do note, also, how computer centres have cool areas in their network locations. Mainframe systems are built in big boxes where the fans make less noise - and you're able to keep computers even colder than the outside areas where we humans are moving around.

The Speed of the Drive Itself

Hard drives run at four speeds nowadays:

1. For ATA/S-ATA drives either 5400rpm or 7200rpm
2. For SCSI drives either 10000rpm or 15000rpm

For the normal user, you normally need to concentrate on ATA/S-ATA drive types. Beyond the speed of rotation of plates inside the drive, you also have in important cache. This is a small amount of data than can be read "after" the actual content you needed, and will often provide the next data needed for the CPU to deliver the data you want. There is much discussion about the effect of caches. You need to test performance by reading what others have said about the drive - as I mention below.

Who Provides the Actual Drive

Some producers don't create the actual hard drive. They create the external box, and put in a hard disc that could come from any of the following companies: Seagate, Quantum, Lenovo (previously IBM), Maxtor etc.

Which producer you prefer depends on your personal preferences. Normally they all provide good drives, but you should make sure you get a decent warranty for your drive. Hard drives contain vital data, and you need a drive that works.

Check Testimonials Online

One of the best tools for checking out a hard drive is to enter the model name into a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. In that way you can see what others say about the product. This can be very nice to know when you see virtually identical technical specifications for two different drives.

In Conclusion

This should give you four good ways to check out your next external hard disc. Remember that testimonials for your specific drive have the advantage of not being dependent upon the producer of the drive, and independent information is often more honest than relying upon technical specifications alone.

Thanks for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed the information, and I would welcome your feedback if you were helped by this article or need any clarification. It would also be nice to know if you have questions that could give ideas for new articles on a similar subject.

I administer numerous blogs, and you can find an overview of these over at http://sites.google.com/site/blunckmeister/

You might also want to see my many interesting hubpages over at http://hubpages.com/profile/h_blunck