An external hard disk drive is a type of hard disk drive which is externally connected to a computer. Modern entries into the market consist of standard SATA, IDE, or SCSI hard drives in portable disk enclosures with SCSI, USB, IEEE Firewire, eSATA client interfaces to connect to the host computer.

External Drive and its very easy to use. You connect it via youre USB or Firewire Port. When you want to install or Download a programm from the Web,you will be prompted to choose the location. There will be a choice to choose from and you select the one you want it to be saved in. You choose which place you want to save it in and give it a name.

Icon on youre Desktop, The folder for the file will be in youre External Drive. To acess youre External Drive through youre PC you will need to do the following. Click on youre External HD to open it and you will see what you have inside. External drive very easily to. Copy your entire music folder to the external drive.

Then you can delete all the songs on the computers hard drive. Make sure the songs are all deleted from itunes. Then add the folder to itunes that contains all your music from your external harddrive. This will put all your music into itunes the same way it was before, except its is locating the music from the external drive. You can move purchased music as easily as you can any other files. Another problem you might encounter is if your laptop picks a different drive to connect to your external hard drive than the one you originally imported the music file from. That happened to me once only. But it has never done that again. If you have all your music on your computer then you dont have to worry about the ipod. If you want to be on the safe side then just manually manage your music. Then nothing will be deleted or added to the ipod unless you specifically direct it to be. If it is manually manage you can use your ipod on any computer you want without anything getting deleted that you dont want deleted. As soon as you copy that folder and delete the music from the computers hard drive itunes will no longer have a clue where that music is located. This is why after you copy the songs and delete them from the computers hard drive you will want to delete everything in itunes.

It wont know where to find the stuff anyways. Then after you delete it all and have a fresh itunes library you will then add this folder, that contains everything you had before, to itunes. The difference between a portable and external hard drive is that a portable hard drive usually doesnt need a power cord for power and an external drive does. Portable drive also may run slower and will have smaller capacity.

Depending on your use and if you plan on carrying your data around then you best bet is to go with an external hard drive. If you have an eSATA port on your computer try to find an external drive that supports that feature.