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What was your first experience of an external hard drive? A towering monster in a bank of flashing lights, as fragile as a blackbird's egg, you needed to wear kid gloves while operating the crane you needed to move them. With luck and a large financial investment you may have got a few extra gigabytes for your computer. In this day and age you can carry more in your back pocket, allowing space for your wallet and bus pass. Today's external hard drives are much more robust, swifter, cheaper and better performing.

An external hard drive is essentially designed to give extra storage. An increasingly popular tool in the mobile age they are connected to your desktop or laptop externally using fire-wire or USB ports. An outer casing gives protection to the hard drive, as they can still be prone to damage from knocks and vibrations. This is essentially due to how they are constructed.

A magnetised rotating disk that can rotate at a mind-boggling seven thousand rpm is within the hard drive casing. The disks are prone to damage and decreased performance just like a CD or DVD. Laptops have smaller discs and thus fewer rotations per minute tend to mean a decreased performance. Normally quoted in gigabytes or even terabytes the capacity of a hard drive these days is, a far cry from the megabyte age of zip and floppy disks. They are getting much smaller but they still vary in size. In today's market with portable hard drives and pen drives you can basically take your memory anywhere.

The end of the external hard drive has been predicted due to the introduction of flash memory storage that most portable hard drives and memory sticks use. The fact they are still the lowest cost random access re-writable storage solution means this is yet to transpire. The drives that are probably most at risk from compact flash memory drives are smaller hard drives. Many companies have already invested in combining the magnetised disks with flash memory capabilities. The future lies in hybrid drives, and in their design.

It seems as if the external hard drive is here to stay for a little while yet. Although the advance in flash memory portable hard drives and memory sticks probably means they will need to find a new incarnation to continue apace with development. Otherwise they may well go the way of the floppy disk and tape cassette.