if keeping your external hard disk plugged to laptop all the time would cause it to spoil easily?

Question

a portable hard disk to be exact not those gigantic external hard disk which can be used for long hours if i'm not wrong.will it get faulty if i keep my external hard disk plugged into my laptop all the time?

Answer 1

If your external hard drive is powered directly from the USB connection then I suggest you don't leave it in all the time. If the external HDD is powered from an adapter then I think it should be ok.

The reason I suggest this is that the USB connectors provide power, but they are not designed for heavy loads. Hard drives are not huge loads, but they are a bit more demanding than most devices such as cameras, mice, and thumb drives. This can cause unecessary wear and tear. USB drives are usually not individually connected to the motherboard. If one fails then the pair or group of them fail. There shouldn't be any reason to keep the exteranal HDD connected at all times anyways. Just whenever you need it will suffice. If you want to have an external HDD enclosure that you can always have connected then you should try getting a networked external HDD enclosure, such as a NAT drive or a specific model called the LAN Disk.

Answer 2

well if the hard drive your taking about is a hard disk and spins like a cd eventually after X amount of hours its going to wear out. Hard drives have a life expetancy of a certian amount of usage hours which if running 24 hours a day 7 days a week is something like 3-4 years but if you turn them off when not using them you can extend the usage time to something more like 6-8 years. but i wouldnt worry about it, in 3-4 years your gona want a new one anyways right.

Answer 3

They are fundamentally the same value. Let's call it "the new math." The difference is the HD marketing and sales staff decided to ignore the computer industry standard for a "K" (which is 2 raised to the 10th power, or 1024) and instead choose to use the metric system concept of "K" (a.k.a. "kilo") which is 1000. Isn't it interesting how doing so just happens to make HDs look bigger. Clearly this is coincidence. :) You can confirm you got what you paid for by doing the math. If you convert 320GB (as metric K) into computer K you'll find it turns into 298GB. (320 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024) = 298.023

Answer 4

External hard disk is same like your internal harddisk, it is called external because ur connecting it externally .
But your hard disk has same life span as your internal harddisk.

Answer 5

No

http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-27200.html

Answer 6

No