REMOVABLE HARD DRIVES

This is another good candidate for a one word article: DON'T!

The original concept was good; have a hard drive that you could unlock and remove at work, take it home in your briefcase, install it on your home computer and have all your current information at your fingertips. And it works well in practice, too. The problems were the initial high costs (each drive was very expensive), the limited applications (you had to have the docking station and special software installed in the machines where you wanted to use the drives) and the drives themselves are fragile - not in the normal sense; as hard drives they are extremely rugged, but compared to a CD? And that is what has caused these drives to become a part of history - they can't compete with CD-RW or DVD-RW drives for convenience, widespread usage, or cost. The only real use I can see for this type of drive is top level security: you could remove this type drive and lock it in a safe, or remove it from the premises altogether, to be absolutely sure that a burglar couldn't steal some sort of top secret information. But, why wouldn't you use a laptop? Then you could lock up or carry off the whole computer. Oh well.....

Removable hard drives install physically like a CD-ROM or any other 5 1/4" drive. There is a docking station that fits into a 5 1/4" bay and plugs into one of your IDE ports, the removable hard drive plugs into that and software is installed to make it usable. They also come in parallel port or SCSI varieties, if it must be an external drive. You must have one of these docking station installed in each of the computers that you want to use the removable hard drive.

If you got here from somewhere other than the table of contents, use the Back Button at the upper left hand side of your screen to go back. It looks like this:

Click here to return to table of contents.