Rabu, 12 Februari 2014

What is a portable hard drive?

Q. Okay, I may sound ignorant, but what exactly is a portable hard drive? Can they act like a normal hard drive? Do you run an OS on them? Can you install programs on them? How much are they? What's the difference between that and a flash drive?


Answer
A portable hd usually refers to a USB connected harddrive that is use to store data. However, newer systems can boot from USB drives (or CDs depending on your OS) and you can use it to intstall your OS. (Not typical however.)

Your OS usually will treat them like a regular harddrive and you can install programs on them, however you wouldn't normally do this since installing programs will usually add entries to the drive where the operating system is to tell the program how to run.

A flash drive refers to "flash memory" these are chip based drives that have no moving parts. Good to carry files around with you. (refered to as key drives sometimes as you can carry one on your keyring) A portable hard drive is more of an external hard drive and has the same technology as one in your PC. (moving parts - a little more likely to damage.)

A flash drive is usally 256 megabytes to 2 gigabytes. USB hard drives can be 10 gigabytes or larger, up to a terabyte. (1000 gigabytes.)

In both cases, you usually want to have all your OS files and programs local to the machine and keep or backup your data on the portable type drives.

can i run applications directly from a portable hard drive?




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for example can i play movies directly from the hard drive or do i have to copy the movie files onto the computer first and play it from there.


Answer
You can do almost anything on a portable hard drive. You have to install the program to your portable hard drive, or use portable applications (found at http://portableapps.com/) to ensure that, should the installer save paths in registry keys or configuration files, they point to the right place, and not to a non-existant location on your hard drive where the files used to be.

However, you must make sure that when you want to use a program/file, your hard drive must be connected to your computer for the duration of the use, and that, unless your portable hard drive is plugged in 24/7, it will not be an on-demand, ready to go experience.

Also, USB read/write speeds will be a bottleneck, so I wouldn't recommend running any games off of a hard drive. Playing movies is usually okay because most modern video players buffer the video quite a bit, and therefore allow for a smooth show.




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