Portable 1TB Hard Drives
I thought that portable 1tb hard drives were still a thing of the future. I was wrong. They get a lot of bad press, though: if you have a look around the Internet for portable 1tb hard drives you’ll quickly notice that the average star ratings they get from people who’ve used them are way down at the wrong end of the scale – and portable 1tb hard drives cost about a million times more than their less pocket-sized counterparts, which of course hardly makes them worth the effort.
The thing is: a terabyte is a LOT. Which means that portable 1tb hard drives are fighting a losing battle against considerations of space (where, pray, is one going to put a fan capable of cooling portable 1tb hard drives, when portable 1tb hard drives have to be about the size of a Nintendo DS?), power (portable 1tb hard drives offer a stupid amount of memory, which needs a daft quantity of power to make it work. So portable 1tb hard drives either have to weigh about nine times what they ought for their size, or run out of juice after five minutes) and practicality.
That said, portable 1tb hard drives do solve the problems of a (very) few: if you work in multimedia, you’ll find portable 1tb hard drives that are capable of storing endless amounts of pictures, music and video, ideal enough for business meetings where you need to display your products effectively. Taking a couple of portable 1tb hard drives up on the train is certainly more cost-effective than trying to take the whole office. Though, again, one half fails to see the point of portable 1tb hard drives even here: in this age of instant connectivity you’re just as likely to be able to hop onto the Internet and download everything you need to show your client in seconds. Which means you can give the same presentation without having to spend 500 quid on a pair of portable 1tb hard drives.
Portable 1tb hard drives will be getting better, as is the way with all things new, and cheaper: watch this space and in a few months you might be putting portable 1tb hard drives in where your externals used to go. Until then, the extra plug is probably worth it.
