Why Go Internal? Price, Price, Price

Here's why you should buy an internal hard drive over and external hard drive: price. For example, as of March 2006, you can by a Samsung 250GB SATA internal drive for $97 online. A 250 GB USB 20 external hard drive from Western Digital costs $159, about 33 percent more for roughly the same storage capacity. Some argue that an internal hard drive has less vibration and will last longer. Others think it's more convenient to deal with a drive within the machine, rather than connected through a USB or Firewire port.
Bottom line: The only difference between internal and external hard drives is price. You pay more for an external drive because it includes a housing and connection.

iPod Rules The Market

iPods rule the portable music business. Why? Apple has been out in front with innovation, from portable hard drives to the iTunes digital music service. Also, Apple has the marketing savvy to keep updating the line with new advances that instantly make their old players obsolete.
Today, Apple has simplified its line to three types of iPod:
* The iPod -- Comes with storage of 30GB or 60GB. This iPod has a brilliant color screen for showing videos and photos, as well as album covers and navigation. The bigger model can hold up to 15,000 songs or 150 hours of video on its hard drive. These iPods sell for $299 and $399, although they can often be found slightly cheaper online.
* iPod Nano -- A shrunken version of the Ipod, the Nano holds up to 1,000 songs in a package roughly the size of a credit card. It has a 1.5-inch color screen, but doesn't do video like its big brother. There are three models of Nano, ranging from $149 to $249 retail.
* iPod Shuffle -- The shuffle is Apple's Flash-based player. It has much smaller capacity -- up to 240 songs in a package roughly the size of a pen. But it can take much more of a pounding than a hard-drive based player. Shuffles are much less expensive, retailing for $69 and $99.

Choose A Flash Drive With Storage Capacity

Flash drives are relatively inexpensive. You can find them as cheap as $10 for a 64MB drive, or more than $100 for a 2GB USB flash drive. The type of flash drive to use depends on how you will use it.
A 256MB USB flash drive can hold a lot of data: dozens of digital pictures, a couple of hours worth of music, or hundreds of Microsoft Word or Excel documents. Anything less might be too small for your thumb drive to be really useful.
Stick with a brand name -- Lexar, SanDisk, Iomega. If money is no object, buy a big one -- 1 GB or 2 GB of storage capacity.

Versatility Of External Drives

Attach external drives to your computer through a USB port and you can enjoy almost limitless expansion of your desktop or laptop's digital memory. There are a number of choices in external drives that expand your hard drive's digital memory. These include the following:
* An external hard drive. You can purchase external hard drives with digital memory from 40 to 400 GB. Expect to pay anywhere from $69 to $500, depending on storage capacity.
* An external tape drive. Tape drives have been the standard for back-ups since the first Univac computers of the 1950s and '60s and they are still used as back-up today. External tape drives can be found anywhere from PCs to large industrial applications and cost anywhere from $500 to thousands of dollars, depending on size and technology.
* An external rewriteable drive. Hook up a CD writer, a DVD writer or even a Mini-Disc to your PC and you have infinite back-up capacity for your digital memory. Each of these technologies uses relatively inexpensive removeable media, meaning that as long as you change the media, you can keep recording. These are all mostly used on the PC level, for home office use.
Bottom line: Use external drives to give your system a strong back-up. Tape drives are mostly for large-scale, mission critical applications, while hard drives can be adapted for both industrial and home use. Removeable media -- CD, DVD, MiniDisc -- are mostly for home use.

Flash MP3 Player Can Take A Pounding

Flash MP3 players don't have the capacity of hard drive-based MP3 players, so you can't carry your music collection of 10,000 songs with you. But MP3 players with Flash memory are usually much smaller and more convenient, and can take more of a pounding. Apple, the industry leader, does make a Flash-based MP3 player, the iPod shuffle. Also dozens of other companies, including Sony, SanDisk, Samsung and Creative, make Flash-based MP3 players. Like the hard drive players, one of the big differences here is the iTunes software. If you've made an investment in iTunes, or plan to, you have to use Apple. If you are mainly transerfing your CD collection to MP3, you can easily use another brand name.

Digital Cameras: More Storage, Cheaper Costs

Digital memory storage options for cameras have grown quickly, along with overall storage options and capacity across the digital storage industry. All camera options are in removeable media, with flash memory. There's no such thing as a hard drive in a digital camera -- so far, at least. That means you can swap digital memory cards in your camera, and almost never run out of space. Virtually all digital cameras use one of the following options: Compact Flash/Microdrives, Secure Digital/Multimedia Cards, or Memory Sticks. Unfortunately, none are compatible. And the decision on which one to use is made by the camera manufacturer.
Sony uses the proprietary Memory Sticks. Compact Flash is generally the standard for most DSLR/pro-level cameras, with capacity of up to 8 GB and counting. SD/MMC cards, which are much smaller, have become the standard for many compact cameras. These cards now run up to 2-4 GB.

The best news in digital camera storage is the price. A few years ago, it cost consumers $500 or more for a 1GB microdrive card. Today, a 1GB CF card, which is quicker than the microdrive, costs less than $100.
Bottom line: You can't pick the type of digital storage to use for your camera; the manufacturer does that. But no matter the digital storage, the products today boast more capacity at a cheaper price.