A media hard drive may be the result of some recent development, but it’s still just and external hard drive inside.

Hard drives have been the part of a personal computer for almost three decades and during these thirty years they’ve evolved in many ways. While the working principals are still the same, they’re many times bigger in capacity and data transfer speeds are just off the chart.

Reliability is also vastly boosted thanks to this feature a hard drive now is considered safe enough to be used in an external drive.

An external hard drive is usually a low power consumption hard drive put into a metal or plastic casing for more convenient storage and added safety. This low consumption device is taken from the laptop world where the battery life is more important than read and write speeds.

Media hard drives are to be used just like any other HDD based external drive. They usually come with an USB 2.0 connector, a cable and a power adapter. After plugging this adapter in, the cable needs to be connected to a free port on the computer and the operating system does everything in the background.

Most recent operating systems, such as Windows 7, Mac OSX snow leopard and Linux kernels after 2.6 are able to use almost any media hard drive right off the box. You just connect it and the system asks what should it do with the new device. Hit browse folders and you’re able to use all the data stored on the disks.

External hard drives are just as expensive as a normal desktop hard drive. There is some overhead for the casing, but nothing substantial. A decent 500GB USB 2.0 Hard drive is about $120.

There is one thing a media hard drive can do but a normal external HDD can’t and it is streaming media to certified devices. There is also a port available for network connection and it enables sharing the device with the whole network without having to put all the content on a computer first.

If you want to buy media HDDs, you better take a look around on the net for reviews and articles about the particular model. While they’re not any more complicated than the good old normal external disks, there are some botched models out there you should be aware of, and online communities and reviews will make you able to avoid them.