Wonderful External USB 3.0 Hard Drive

For those of you who are doing your courses that involve virtual machines, you may find that virtual machines tend to "blow up" as you tweak them in your labs, and they also take up enormous amounts of disk space. In my case, I am doing all of my labs on my personal notebook computer. I have the following specs in my notebook:

• Dell XPS L501X - 15.6" WLED Screen
• 640GB 7200 RPM Hard Disk Drive
• 2GB Nvidia GT 435M Video Card
• 8GB DDR3 RAM
• USB 3.0 and eSATA

When you are completed with a lab, it is good to back up your virtual machine so that if it blows up on the next lab, you can easily restore it from your backup. In my case, I am using a USB 3.0 Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB.

This external hard drive provides the following:

• Small Size (roughly the size of my tri-fold wallet)
• Plenty of storage space at 1TB
• Stays cool even with constant usage
• Transfer speeds average around 63 MBps on large image files such as virtual hard drives As of Windows 7 Service Pack 1, my speeds have increased to about 74 MBps.

If you are interested in this hard drive, you can find it at www.wdc.com, or, in my case, the best price was from Amazon.com. It is roughly $106.