An example of the simplification of this process. Over the holidays, my dad needed to buy an external hard drive to backup his music collection. He has one of these hi-fi devices that has a built-in hard drive and is slowly transferring his music collection to it.
We bought it from a retailer because he wanted it right then, so he could run the backup procedure and have me fix it if it didn't work (yes, family tech support is a joy). We went into the shop, and none of the USB external hard drive manufacturers actually tell you what speed the drive runs at. That is, they don't tell you what RPM the drives run at. As it is a backup drive, it's not like it needs to be fast (the first run may take all night, but afterwards, it will probably only be a gigabyte or so of changed files every few days). But the fact that none of the companies actually advertise the RPM slightly shocked me. Not just on the boxes either, but if I scanned the barcodes with the barcode/QR app I have on my phone, the manufacturers websites don't list the RPM either.
We bought it from a retailer because he wanted it right then, so he could run the backup procedure and have me fix it if it didn't work (yes, family tech support is a joy). We went into the shop, and none of the USB external hard drive manufacturers actually tell you what speed the drive runs at. That is, they don't tell you what RPM the drives run at. As it is a backup drive, it's not like it needs to be fast (the first run may take all night, but afterwards, it will probably only be a gigabyte or so of changed files every few days). But the fact that none of the companies actually advertise the RPM slightly shocked me. Not just on the boxes either, but if I scanned the barcodes with the barcode/QR app I have on my phone, the manufacturers websites don't list the RPM either.