Today we have a fantastic deal from Newegg: Western Digital Black 640GB External Hard Drive for only $70 (after rebate).

Rob writes, "I'm running out of hard disk space on my computer, and I was wondering: should I upgrade my internal hard drives, or should I buy an external drive for additional storage?"

There are a couple of things you need to consider when you're purchasing more storage space for your computer: how much space do you need, and how fast do you need it to be?

External drives suffer from one main flaw: they're slow. External interfaces have, historically, been slow. Even the proposed USB 3.0 standard is slower than the capabilities of SATA II or SATA III. So, when you buy an external hard drive that uses USB 2.0, you're going to find that your file transfers will take a while - and large transfers could take several hours to complete.

With that being said, external hard drives are great if you don't want to, or can't, install a new hard drive in your computer. There are times when you just don't want to bother with an internal drive, or you just need a "quick fix" for your storage needs. In both of these cases, and external drive is probably preferred to the standard internal one.

Of course, there is one major benefit to using an external drive: portability. Being able to carry 1TB of data around and transfer it to almost any computer out there is much easier than trying to send that same data over the Internet or a slow network.

If you have a question, email me: lordkat@gmail.com

Today we have a fantastic deal from Newegg: Western Digital Black 640GB External Hard Drive for only $70 (after rebate).

Be safe,
Jason