The Desktop External Hard Drive

Desktop external hard drives are normally 3.5" hard drives mounted in a larger enclosure than its portable counterpart. The enclosure may also have fans integrated to assist in keeping the drive cool during operation, which extends the life of the disk drive

The desktop external hard drive is designed with storage capacity in mind, rather than portability. Common desktop hard drives boast 500GB of storage, which would have been unbelievable only a few years ago. In fact, the storage capacity of these drives currently go to 1TB (TeraByte) and above. These type of external hard drives are still portable in a sense, i.e., you can still unplug them and transport them. They often come with a separate power supply, which can be vital when you are transfering lots of data, as it maintains a constant current independant of the computer's USB power supply