Best external hard drive under $100 - 2010

I choose to write an article about the best external hard drive under $100 because there is no need to go any higher to find a reliable, high quality and performance, branded hard drive. Bellow this $100 you can easily find 1,5TB and 1TB models to back up your personal data like pictures, personal movies, music and so on. I searched and found the best models in this price category. I chose based on overall price per space (gigabyte) as well as dimensions, ease of use, noise, design, ability to connect and use with almost any modern computer built in the last 8 to 10 years, and a few other factors. Even though I did not give grades to those hard drives, I did choose and order them in accordance to these factors. I just hand picked the best gems out there. I recommend online shopping of external hard drives because most come with free shipping and are delivered within a few business days.

I hand picked tree hard disks for this review, this external Hard Disk from Western Digital is my first recommendation for the best external hard drive under $100. Choosing this was an easy task, it offers the best price per storage space in this category, 1,5 TB is a lot of space. This guy can easily handle and store all of your personal data. Besides space, this hard drive is extremely light, actually even lighter than the 1TB Iomega hard drive that I will present later. The LED indicator is placed in the back, this way it won't inconvenience you while using your computer.

This Western Digital hard drives is a plug-n-play device, no frills or trills. You just get it out of the box and begin to use it. It's NTFS formatted meaning that it will instantly work on Windows machines. This also means a reformat if you are a Mac user. It does not come with any fancy, most of the time good for nothing back-up software. I personally only had problems with external hard drives that come bundled with back-up and other protection software as it makes it hard to use a hard drive on multiple platforms. What if you use Windows on your primary computer, and who knows why, there is a need to use your external hard drive with its own software encryption on a Mac or Linux computer? If the manufacturer doesn't offer support for Mac or Linux you will have a problem, a troublesome one at that. And most manufacturers don't offer this support. That's why I like this hard drive, it's extremely simple to use, just connect it to your computer, and it will work flawlessly.

Here are a few specs on this hard drive:

It holds:

• Up to 400,000 digital photos
• Up to 500,000 songs (MP3)
• Up to 50,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
• Up to 150 hours of Digital Video (DV)
• Up to 770 hours of DVD quality video
• Up to 240 hours of HD video

Iomega is not a hard drive manufacturers, but hard drive packagers. Iomega Prestige uses a noiseless Seagate Barracuda. The housing of this external hard drive is made of aluminium, and I must admit that it has a stylish design. Iomega offers a power switch for this product, a great idea, this way you don't have to pull the plug when you don't use it anymore. Unlike the afformetioned Western Digital, Iomega comes with just 1TB of space, still enough to back-up most of the data on any modern computer.

Remember what I said about external hard drives with bundled software? This one is no exception. It does have back-up software among other bells and whistles, however the software is PC only. If you want to back-up data on a Mac you will have to find yourself some apps to do the job. This hard drive comes NTFS formatted, for use with Apple it must be reformatted.

With 1TB of storage capacity, the Prestige gives you the ability to store up to 4 million photos, over 18,500 hours of music, or 1,500 hours of video.

The thing is that for 9 more bucks you could get the Western Digital with 500GB more data capacity.

This is a designer external Hard Drive, ok just kidding. But it does look impeccable, like a spaceship specially made to hold your data. LaCie are hard disk packagers just like Iomega. LaCie usually package Seagate hard drives. I must admit that I actually choose this one because of it's design. It just looks great. LaCie offers you a few bundled goodies with this hard drive, but I wouldn't rely on them. That's just me. I do my own back-ups when I feel like it, I don't use any software. You could call me old fashioned. LaCie is a french company known to combine high quality components with great design.

In my opinion, Western Digital, they offer more than the competition for almost the same money. I admit that Iomega and LaCie have great designs. They even offer software to ease your shoulders while backing up your data, but that software has its limits, but that is where it ends. If you are inclined to spend a little more you could easily get an 2 TB external hard drive from Western Digital.

So my recommendation for the best hard drive under $100 - 2010 is Western Digital Elements external hard drive, and the second prize goes to Iomega. Things might change in 2011 when USB 3.0 will become mainstream offering 10 times the speed of USB 2.0, but until then there is Christmas, New Years Eve and... many more.