So, you want a bit more storage space for your files, do you? Got too much music? Too many movies? Too much material of an illicit nature? Whatever the reason, you’re going to want an external hard drive. And in much the same way as a computer, you’re going to want to care for it and maintain it. External drives might not require as much maintenance as a computer, but if they’re used improperly, well…

They’ll break just the same.

Now, I’ve spoken a bit about hard drives before – they come in two varieties: SSD and HDDs. In the case of the former, they can take a bit more punishment than their older, larger brethren, but at the same time, limited reads and writes. For posterity’s sake, this guide’s going to assume you’ve shelled out for an HDD external, and not an SSD external.

Anyway, here’s a few (common sense) things you’re going to want to make sure you do as your external hard drive’s concerned:

Don’t Move It While It’s Turned On.

You’d think this to be common sense, right? Yeah, no. For some reason, a lot of people seem to think ‘portable hard drive’ automatically means they can move it around all they want, regardless of what it happens to be doing at the time. External hard drives are very similar to regular hard drives: they contain a lot of (delicate) moving parts and if you jostle them when they turn on, well…

There’s a good chance those parts will break.

Eject It, Don’t Unplug It.

This is more on the software side than the hardware side. If you’ve got an external hard drive plugged into your system, don’t just yank out the cord when you’re done using it. Go down to your taskbar and select “safely remove hardware” then select the hard drive. Failing to do this could result in some pretty considerable data corruption, even though it’s not likely to harm the physical drive itself.

Don’t Jostle It. Period.

If you’re going to carry your external hard drive around with you, make sure it’s padded and secured in such a way that it’s not going to suffer physical shock or trauma of any kind. Sure, there’s a chance your HDD will get through everything unharmed, but there’s an equal chance you might completely zog up the whole system and render some (or all) of the files on the drive completely unreadable.

If you ask me, that’s not exactly a risk you want to take, particularly if you’re storing important files on there.

So, long story short, playing catch with your HDD is a bad idea.

Image Credits: Harddriveportable.net

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