Portable Hard Drives
Most external hard disk drives out in the market are portable using a various types of connections like SCSI, IDE, USB, FireWire/IEEE 1394. Firewire/IEEE 1394 and USB hard drives are external units containing ATA or SCSI disks. FireWire technology sets to grow and even when the rival USB is fully compatible, FireWire2 is most probably ready to run over USB 2.0 with a better transfer rate. Today, the market for external drives are aimed into portability including increasing the capacity of the portable hard drives. Portable hard drives have similar architecture with normal hard drives. Almost portable hard drives are fully compatible with three operating systems in the market each having their own formatting tools.
USB Hard Drives
Universal Serial Bus(USB) ports can be found on PC’s lately. And it is now one the usual ways to connect a device to a PC. With USB, devices were able to connect faster and easier. Shutting down the computer to install a USB device would not be necessary as the devices are hot-pluggable and can easily be detected by the system. Before connections on these devices were limited to serial and parallel connection and was relatively slower. With USB 2.0 data transfers rates could be theoretically achieved up to 480 Mbps which is faster than USB 1.1. USB connectors can be found on almost every device from keyboards, printers, mice and external hard drives.
Firewire Hard Drives
Also know as IEEE 1394 it is a high bandwidth interface for computers peripherals and other consumer electronics. FireWire was intentionally made by Apple computers as a high speed serial bus. And now the format is rapidly developing more importantly with digital editing applications who can benefit more on this technology. And in the same advantage with USB, FireWires are hot-swappable and can also attach a lot of devices together. FireWire also have a transfer speed of about 400Mbps and this is more that the bandwidth of USB where can acquire a higher transfer rate on most cameras, cd writers, hard drives and more.