External drives today have gained much popularity because of its ease of use and versatility to connect to any computer. In addition, one of the reasons for buying an external drive is the desire user to protect data stored on your computer from hacker threats, or unauthorized persons. Modern external hard drives have a large capacity that can record on them almost any information. Through external drive will always be the right data at hand, while remaining intact. Initially all data loggers were external and connected to a computer via cables, which was due to a general state of technology of information storage. In particular, in 1956, IBM produced the first drive on the hard disk drive, which was a huge closet. It was a great big package of 50 plates 24-inch each.

In this case the information capacity of the drive was only 5 MB. Individual plates were mounted on a rotating spindle. Special mechanical arm contains read-write head and moved up and down on a vertical rod. Despite the awkwardness of this construction, it was the inspiration for the creation of all future hard disk drives. However, today already use a separate pair read-write head for each magnetic surface, rather than the total for the whole disk. Thanks to the invention of hard disk drives have become the primary means of storing and recording information during the next decades and to this day. In the early seventies, all the same, IBM introduced the world's first compact disk, which was placed in a fully enclosed housing.