A review is a way of getting a feedback from customers and users about a certain product, and it’s rather wise to read reviews from various places before actually buying that product. There are several places on the Internet where you can find the latest external hard drive reviews (2009). Publishers of the reviews use different criteria in rating different brands of external drives. They rate them according to capacity, speed of data transfer, and durability.

According to most of the reviews suggest the Seagate FreeAgent Pro harddrive is the best external hard drive in 2009. However, some people say it is not fast enough. Some of the reviewers that rate it to be the best choice include BIGBruin.com and Register Hardware. Maximum PC and Extreme Tech give it an average rating due to its slow speed especially when connected via USB. Some reviewers claim that the on/off button doesn’t work as it should and the only way to turn off is to unplug it. Few reviewers go extreme and suggest that all Seagate drives fail eventually.

Other top brands that are often reviewed include Maxtor and Iomega. Different external hard disks have various characteristics according to their speed, capacity, durability, storage, etc., that’s why the reviews are so different.

Technically, portable hard drives are external hard disk drives that provide easy carrying to any place where you may need to use them. Their design is simple and the size is small (a portable cannot be big, can it?). Some of them are so small that they can fit in one’s pocket or a palm and yet have a very large storage space that range from tens to hundreds of gigabytes.

They can be easily connected and operated under all of the existing operating systems. They are basically used to transfer data from one computer to another. Most of the portable hard drives have universal serial bus (USB) ports. You can use a portable drive to keep personal photos, audio mp3 files, archived web pages, games, movies, etc.

You can also use portable hard drives to have various presentations, notes and other documents at hand, especially if you are doing business overseas. Portable hard drives can also be used as a backup for data, as a computer may crop up or crush when you do not expect that. Data saved on a portable hard drive becomes a savior in this case. Be they large or small, portable hard drives function the same way as an internal hard drive. You just plug it in and transfer data.