Bottom post of the previous page:
Firstly, lets clarify something.Cheeveer wrote:How does a portable harddrive work? Is it like a huge USB-memory or can you use it to install games and d/l stuff onto it?
A USB flash Drive:
A portable hard drive that's basically non-stable. It doesnt have the power to change the data on it's own, so it's only way of changing/deleting contents on it, is to have the information flashed (A term that makes it easier to understand). If the device is dropped, it'll most likely survive & will live to fight another day. Not suseptable to to many issues.
A portable hard drive:
Like, a flash drive, it holds data. However, with the portable hard drive, it has a magnetic disk inside that holds the data. It's pretty much like the hard drive in your computer, except, it's portable.
Portable hard drive's hold alot more data than a flash drive, & overall are not that bad value for money, equating to $1 per Gigabite. Problem is that if the hard drive falls, or sustains heavy damage it will cause a 'head crash'. This basically means all data will be lost, & the device will be useless, pretty much meaning you have to throw it away.
Downloading stuff to them is okay, but there are some issues that arise. If you have say, Getright which records the download path & where the download will go to, & you start at one machine, & then go to another one to continue, you can have problems, such as a different drive letter/number being assigned, & then the download crapping up because paths are wrong for the directory which it's saving stuff to.
Also, when you want to format it, make sure you choose NTFS (New Technology File System [I beleive that's what it's called]) over FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32Bits) because NTFS lets files be any size, where as FAT32 craps up when they are 4Gig or over (Meaning it's just not gonna happen)