Considerations
Remember that your new drive is still unformatted. Formatting your drive so that it's usable, however, is easy enough. When you first connect your new drive to your PC or Macintosh, the computer will recognize the device as new hard drive and ask you to format it. Assuming you are going to be connecting this drive to one or more PCs running the Windows XP Operating System, "NTFS" is the clear choice for the file system you should select for formatting. If you plan to move your new drive between PC and Macintosh systems, "FAT32" might make a better choice for a cross-platform device.
Automated Backups
There are a number of automated software backup tools that you can install to backup all of your data to these devices. If you are very worried about your drive, (especially if it is nearing its end of life), you can boot to a special program CD that will allow you to backup your entire C Drive to this unit. If something ever happens that causes your primary drive to fail, all you have to do is take the hard drive out of your external enclosure and install it in your PC.
Transporting Large Files
Best of all, nothing beats the price, speed, and capacity of an external hard drive for transporting very large files. If you are someone who deals with very large Photoshop, digital video, music, or PowerPoint files, an external drive lets you quickly store your images and transport them to any other computer. This is not only faster than burning a CD, but provides greater capacity and can be much cheaper in the long run than other storage alternatives.
Glossary
Universal Serial Bus (USB), an external bus standard that supports data transfer rates of 12 Mbps. A single USB port can be used to connect up to 127 peripheral devices, such as mice, modems, and keyboards. USB also supports Plug-and-Play installation and hot plugging.
Firewire, a very fast external bus standard that supports data transfer rates of up to 400Mbps (in 1394a) and 800Mbps (in 1394b). Products supporting the 1394 standard go under different names, depending on the company. Apple, which originally developed the technology, uses the trademarked name FireWire. Other companies use other names, such as i.link and Lynx, to describe their 1394 products. A single 1394 port can be used to connect up 63 external devices. In addition to its high speed, 1394 also supports isochronous data -- delivering data at a guaranteed rate. This makes it ideal for devices that need to transfer high levels of data in real-time, such as video devices. Similarly to USB, 1394 supports both Plug-and-Play and hot plugging, and also provides power to peripheral devices.
Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), a parallel interface standard used by Apple Macintosh computers, PCs, and many UNIX systems for attaching peripheral devices to computers. Nearly all Apple Macintosh computers, excluding only the earliest Macs and the recent iMac, come with a SCSI port for attaching devices such as disk drives and printers. SCSI interfaces provide for faster data transmission rates (up to 80 megabytes per second) than standard serial and parallel ports. In addition, you can attach many devices to a single SCSI port, so that SCSI is really an I/O bus rather than simply an interface.
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