What are the components of an external hard drive? The connectors and such?

Question

A website that breaks it down would be great :-)

Answer 1

External hard drives are similar to internal hard drives except they have their own housing (outer case), their own power supply which is plugged into a wall outlet, and a connection to the pc - usually a usb connector.

They come in different capacities.

Often these are plug and play. You plug them in the usb port and they configure themselves. Files can be transferred via Windows Explorer.

There is another variant of this, called a network drive. These have ethernet ports and they are accessible on the LAN. These can be accessed by several users.

Answer 2

Here's a website that breaks it down;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_hard_drive

At least the theory, principal and economics.