Your external hard drive won’t last long if you keep doing these things

External hard drives don’t get nearly enough credit. They’re the quiet workhorses holding all the oversized files we can’t afford to store on our PCs, the photo and video collections we’d be heartbroken to lose, and those backups we pray never have to earn their keep. They’re handy, easy to toss in a bag, and usually not too pricey either. Yet for all their usefulness, they are not nearly as tough as they look. Underneath the plastic or metal casing is fragile hardware that can give up the ghost so fast, especially if you’re rough with it.