Removable hard disk drives

Read about Removable storage here.

The removable hard drive is a simple and effective way to meet your need for removable storage and data back-up.

Assuming you have a free IDE connector (SCSI removable drives are also available) and a free 3.5" floppy drive bay, installing a removable drive may be the cheapest (per GB of data) option for the storage-hungry PC user. In fact, there is almost nothing wrong with these removable drives, except for the little fact that they are far less popular than Zip or Jaz drives. The only thing needed is the docking bay (about $35 to $100 depending on quality and interface type), a key (provided with the drive for security reasons), and computer restart - and you have one extra hard drive! And this is a real hard drive with its large capacity and fast data transfer rates. With the today's falling price for HDDs, you can easily have about 10 mobile GBs of storage and backup for under $180 - $200.

Of course, the relative complexity of installation and low (compared to the Zip family) popularity makes removable HDDs a choice for users of storage-intensive applications, such as large graphic files, databases, data logs, etc. A good application is data exchange between two or more of your own computers or computers within the same organization since sending 3 GB of data through the net could take a while...

The removable hard drive is also an excellent backup option, which allows updating information when necessary and stores large volumes of data at low cost per GB.

From the technical point of view, removable hard drives are just the same as standard hard drives with simplified access to the controller connector and power cable, which makes swapping the drives an easy task.

Compare different removable storage systems here!