External USB drives make a lot of sense for computer users not comfortable with upgrading their laptop or desktop internal drives and as a backup device. Photos, movie clips, music, pdf, and other image files take up vast amounts of storage space on your hard drive. One friend of mine’s daughter, a former Apple Store genius, has 1.5 Terabytes of online media stored. Luckily the cost of storage keeps dropping. In particular, the deck of card sized portable laptop usb drives have become exceptional value cost wise and capacity wise.
Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi, Samsung, and Western digital all make external drives with similar formats, capacities, and weight. There are also drives available under the Verbatim, Iomega, HP, Lacie, and Simpletech brands. All have similar warranties, are available in a wide variety of colors, and a wide variety of prices. Shop hard to find the best deal, these portable hard drives are popular promotional items for the big box office supply stores. I use the cost/Gb to determine the best deal.
During Black Friday, Western Digital My Essential 500Gb USB 2.0 drives were featured for $59.99 each at Target. They have a nice matte black finish that doesn’t attract the fingerprints and scratches of the WD My Passport models. I bought two and received a $10 gift card so the net cost was $54.99 each. Using the cost/Gb rule, $.11 per gigabyte is a bargain. Compare that to a 4gb USB flash drive; at about $12.00 retail, you would pay $3.00 per gigabyte.
The two My Essential drives replaced two 250Gb Simpletech Mini drives, which I purchased in mid 2008 for $65 each, ironically still close to today’s pricing. Removiing two screws on the case of the Simpletech drive revealed 2.5″ Western Digital SATA drives, which were remarketed as laptop drives on ebay at $49.99 each. Taking $5 off for postage and ebay/paypal fees, I net $44.99. My effective cost for doubling storage capacity is only $20,00 to go from 500gb to 1Tb, before sales tax. That’s $.04 per Gigabyte folks!