What are external hard drives useful for?

Question

I own a business and use Quickbooks, but need to transport that information to other computers. Is it possible to have it installed onto the external hard drive instead of my computer's hard drive? Or can games be installed on there? Are they basically just useful for storing data and pictures? Kind of like a flash drive on steroids? Just wondering exactly what the external drives are capable of.

Answer 1

External hard drives are no different from internal ones, once they're connected.
I would recommend that you leave QuickBooks installed on your main internal Windows drive. But there's nothing stopping you saving (or moving) the QuickBooks data file onto the external hard drive and accessing it there. It would mean you could move the Quickbooks data files between computers easily, but you would have to have a working installation of Quickbooks wherever you wanted to use it.
I would not recommend you trying to install Quickbooks itself to an external hard drive. This is because Windows applications install themselves usually to a hard drive, but also put information into the Windows 'Registry', which is a store of useful little bits of information for a program. If you tried to run Quickbooks from an external hard drive on a computer which you hadn't installed it on, it COULD fail to load. I say 'could' because some applications don't tie themselves too tightly to the Registry, and Quickbooks could be one of them because I think I ran Quicken successfully after copying it.

Other than that, external hard drives are great for backing up data. People always think backing up is a great idea and never get around to doing it until after they've suffered a computer failure. So I'd get one for backing up your important stuff. if you burn yours onto CD/DVD already then fair enough.

External hard drives these days either use Firewire or USB 2.0 connections. If your computer is recent enough it should have USB 2.0 which is faster than the first version of USB. Trying to move large files of data on USB 1 is painfully slow.
External hard drives can have much bigger capacities than flash drives because they are using magnetic disks inside them instead of flash memory.
So, when moving lots of data around, backing up your important files, then external hard drives are the way to go!
Hope this helped.

Answer 2

I have an external ZIP drive, and I use it to download/upload files on the computers at the library, since my A-drive at home is not working. I can fit more files on a ZIP drive, but it's very hard to find a public computer that has one. This drive doesn't have any storage space on it, it just loads the disk and transfers the data to/from the computer.

Answer 3

It's a hard drive which allows you to store tons more info that your regular internal drive and the beauty about it is that you can hook it up to almost any other PC that's compatible. Like you said, it's like a flash drive on mega doses of steroids. Works for any type of files, music, data, movies. You would definitely be at an advantage in using one in your line of work.

Answer 4

Since most laptops do not have more than 60-80 gigabytes of storage, it is very useful to have an external drive. Even though it is expensive, it is worth it. It is also easy to carry around

Answer 5

you can do anything with them that you can do with a regular hard drive.

you can install programs on them and such stuff. if you can do it on your regular hard drive, you can do it on the external one. they hold more than a flash drive, that's for sure. you can transport your data to other computers, provided they have the drivers to recognize the external hard drive.

Answer 6

It's like a hard drive, only outside your computer, so you can do pretty much anything you'd do with an internal one.