What are the alternatives to an Apple external hard drive?

External hard drives are valuable accessories for any laptop and many personal computers. Their costs can be high, especially when they are branded by companies such as Apple. Fortunately, there are many alternatives to Apple branded external hard drives. This article discusses about the alternatives to an Apple external hard drive.

The interface

Most PC laptops and nearly all desktop computers have two 'plug and play' interfaces which can be used for external hard drives. Firewire and USB
These two interfaces are 'Firewire' and 'USB' (Universal Serial Bus). Apple Mac computers are no different in supplying both interfaces on their laptops and desktop systems. Traditionally, a PC notebook or laptop, unlike Apples, will use a USB interface for an external hard drive. Apples generally use the Firewire interface that can provide 50–400 MB/s data transfer, far superior to the data transfer rates that a USB port can manage. Fortunately, Firewire is a standard and it is readily available from a variety of manufacturers.

Where to get one?

The range of external hard drives is vast, most mainstream hard drive manufacturers such as Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung sell external versions of their hard drives in both USB and Firewire flavours. For Apple, it is certainly best to stick with Firewire due to the performance benefits, so some care is required when making your purchase. Mainstream vendors
Most mainstream vendors stock Firewire ports, so the normal sources are well worth going to. PC World, Curries and Maplins all stock suitable hard drives, as do online sources such as Amazon, Ebuyer, Newegg or eBay. As you can see, there isn't much to worry about, for a simple external drive for backup or to allow data transfer between two systems, all you need to worry about are the following: A firewire drive and the capacity of the drive. Protection If you are carrying your disk around a lot, throwing it into bags and potentially knocking it, then it's worth looking for a ruggedised version. These use rubber like materials to provide shock absorption and to reduce the chance of your data becoming damaged in transit. Advice In fact, it must be remembered that your external hard drive is a mechanical device, if you fail to look after it, you can easily damage it. Damaging a hard drive can irretrievably lose data, so an amount of care when handling must be considered. As you can see, alternatives are readily available and cost much less than the Apple equivalent.