External Hard Drive: the perfect Netbook accessory

(cue nostalgic music)… I remember the first PC I assembled by myself. It had 256MB of RAM, and AMD processor and a 10GB Hard Drive — you heard that right, a dinky 10GBs. Gone are those days, even netbooks today come with a 160GB HDD at the very least. But the way we consume, create, and store data 160GBs is hardly enough. That is why MacPCWiz gives you this holiday recommendation — get an External Hard Drive for your Netbook.

This Acer Aspire One AOD250 only has 160GBs of HDD space

Smaller Systems mean Less Space

Netbooks are all the rage these days, and not for bad reasons either — they’re small, lightweight, portable, and can do just about anything you need to do while on-the-go. But the fact remains, HDD (hard drive) space has never been one of the netbook’s strong selling points. People have this distinct need for hard drive space — this is one thing we can never get enough of. We create documents, edit documents, download and THEN edit documents. We store music and videos, we download music and videos. We create pictures and images, we need to store them. Space is always a need.

Netbooks have 160GBs of space ordinarily, 250GB at most. At some point in time, you’re gonna run out, and with the netbook’s meager processing power and resources — your tiny netbook will slow down considerably when your HDD becomes full up.

Solution: Store your data externally – External Hard Drives to the rescue!

I was once a technical support specialist, and this I always give as an important piece of advice for my clients — If you can’t afford to lose this data, store it outside of the system. Let’s face it — a computer system is only as good as the software handling it. Sooner or later the software’s gonna have glitches, issues, errors. And when your system crashes, your data is suddenly very vulnerable.

Others call it data back up, some call it data storage — I call it just plain wisdom. If I can’t afford to lose it, I’ll make a copy onto a location which is secure. This is a practice I started 4 years ago and I have reaped the benefits of it. If it’s that important, it goes directly to my portable  Hard Drive.

What kind of External HDDs to get

The main consideration in getting an external hard disk is “How much space do I need?” There is no direct answer to this one. You yourself can gauge how much data you handle, and so decide how large an external hard drive to get.

This stylish Toshiba External Hard Drive has 320GBs of data space for you

For students who store only documents and text-based files, 80-120GBs should do fine. If you work with multimedia — music and videos — you can probably look at 200GBs above. It really depends on your needs and lifestyle, and what kind of data will be stored in it. As we have said, you ALWAYS need the space, always. Start out with a 250GB Portable Hard Drive, and you’ll probably ask why you never got one in the first place.

Pairing an External Hard Drive with your Netbook

For external HDD’s, a USB connection is standard. Never fear, USB ports are pretty much a constant on netbooks. Large amounts of music, videos, pictures and documents will clog up your netbook’s hard drive in time. Better to start saving some of these externally — that way you keep them secure, and available when you need them.

For more arguments to this point, we brought you our Top 10 External HDD picks here in our past article.

In the final argument, an External Hard Drive is a no brainer. Our times demand that we have a secure storage for important data. An external Hard Drive is your ticket to data security, and a relatively long and error-free life for your netbook. Why wouldn’t anybody want that?

PS

An External DVD Burner would also work as a backup solution for you netbook. Just saying.