What port can you use to connect an external hard drive?


Which one of these connection types are NOT commonly used to connect external hard drives?

A) eSATA

B) USB

C) SCSI

D) FireWire


Answer: C) SCSI

As our use of digital pictures and movies has increased, the popularity of the external hard drive market has followed. To take advantage of these storage devices, you’ll need to be sure your computer can properly connect. All external drives have at least one of these port types, and some drives even include multiple port options. Unfortunately, SCSI isn’t one of those commonly-seen options. Although external SCSI-connected drives do exist for use in data centers and large computing environments, you won’t see SCSI ports on any commercially available external hard drives.

The incorrect answers:
A) eSATA
eSATA is one of the latest external connection technologies. Based on SATA, these external eSATA connectors extend very high speed SATA interfaces to the outside of your computer.

B) USB
Universal Serial Bus is one of the most popular and extensible external ports on computers today. USB is used for almost everything, including keyboards, mice, network connections, and external hard drives.

D) FireWire
The popularity of FireWire on new systems has been in decline, but there’s still a large market of computers with FireWire ports. The high-speed throughput of FireWire makes it a great choice for external storage devices.

Want to know more? Watch “Removable Drive Technology.”


Removable drives have been around since the floppy drive days, and the latest generation of USB, Firewire, and eSATA removable drives provide an amazing amount of storage in some of the smallest packages the industry has ever seen. In this video, we?ll show you how the latest removable and portable storage technologies work with today?s computing platforms.<