External Hard Drive
- An external hard drive is designed to be portable and typically connects to your computer with a USB cable. Some varieties may also have an extra power adapter.
- These drives have lots of fragile moving parts on the inside and must be handled with care! When shipping these drives, pack with at least two inches of padding on all sides.
Internal Hard Drive
- Internal hard drives are used in both laptop and desktop personal computers and must be removed from your computer in order to recover the data.
- If you do not know how to remove the hard drive from your computer, we recommend having a local computer repair shop or other expert remove the drive for you. You may also send us your entire laptop (no desktops, please!) and we will remove the drive when we receive it.
- These drives have lots of fragile moving parts on the inside and must be handled with care! When shipping these drives, pack with at least two inches of padding on all sides.
Solid State Drive
- Solid state drives come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and are typically both lightweight and compact. They are internal drives, commonly used in modern laptops and some desktop computers.
- If you do not know how to remove the hard drive from your computer, we recommend having a local computer repair shop or other expert remove the drive for you. You may also send us your entire laptop (no desktops, please!) and we will remove the drive when we receive it.
USB Flash Drive
- Commonly called flash drives or thumb drives, these are thumb-sized storage devices that connect to your computer via USB.
SD Card
- SD cards come in standard, mini, and micro sizes, and are typically used in digital cameras, smartphones, and other small electronic devices.
Compact Flash Card
- Compact Flash devices are much larger than SD cards and are most commonly used in high-end cameras and similar devices.
NAS
- NAS means "Network Attached Storage." These devices may look and function similar to an external hard drive, but they connect to your network with an ethernet cable instead of plugging into your computer with a USB cable.
- These devices contain a mechanical internal drive with lots of fragile moving parts and must be handled with care! When shipping these devices, pack with at least two inches of padding on all sides.
