Many of you have probably seen or heard of an external hard drive, but for those of you who have not used an external hard drive is just a storage device like the hard drive inside of your laptop except this one outside of your laptop in a standalone box. You can connect these to your monitors as well provided it supports them and convert your old monitor into a TV setup. For more on this visit callnerds.com and check out their post on how to use a monitor to watch tv and more? These drive is usually connected to something like your laptop via a usb hub, firewire, or SATA cable.

Now that you know what an external hard drive is lets get to the numerous number of uses they can bee used for:
• A great way to add addition storage space to your laptops minuscule standard internal hard drive.
• A great way to backup important data.
• An easy way to transfer programs and data from one computer to another.
• An essential device if you ever want to reformat your hard drive and do not want to loose all of your data.

These are just the main reasons that people use external hard drives. The best thing about an external hard drive is the price. In todays market you can buy a 500GB external hard drive for the cheap price of $80! What an easy solution to so many problems. Anyone who has a laptop should have an external hard drive. It is a necessity for so many things and it is so easy to use. Literally all you have to do is plug the device into your computer and your computer will automatically recognize the device. Then to save items onto your hard drive, just drag and drop them into the hard drives folder.