Does anyone know how to say “External USB Hard Drive” in Chinese?
Also, are these things easy to install and use?
Thanks!
Dunno how it’s called but it should be easy to install and use, normally it’s plug and play, if Windows knows the device you don’t even need to install a driver, else just insert the CD which (hopefully) comes with the hard drive.
Once correctly installed you should see an additional drive icon in your file manager / Explorer.
Technically, 移动闪存盘 or 移动快闪记忆体盘, but I doubt that these expressions have ever passed anyone’s lips. 
Mainland term from Google: 電腦資料筆
More promising: 行动碟 “movable disk”
I have one of these things, and use it at school almost every day, but I guess I just call it 那个.
(For a good time, Google on “USB flash drive”, “USB pen drive” and similar tidbits.)
I just bought one about 2 weeks ago: 80GB HD in an aluminium case.
Basically, it’s just a normal “internal” HD which goes into a special case. The case is connected to your computer via a usb cable.
Obviously, the cost of the HD’s and cases all vary…
Although I’m a complete novice to these things, it was easy to install and it’s worked well.
BTW, I just went up to the sales attendant and explained in Chinese that I wanted a hard drive that I could use “outside of the computer”. They understood.
The Big Babou ,
How much was it and where did you buy it?
external HD = waijie yingdie.
In Taiwan computerspeke USB is the same (“USB”), hard disk drive is rendered “ha-di”
The cases sell for NT$1000, HDs from NT$1000 up depending on capacity and brand.
I paid about $2800 for the hard drive (IBM 80GB) and then another $1900 for the case. There were a couple of other cases there, priced from about $1000, but I was recommended the smaller aluminium case; can’t exactly remember why… maybe better quality, less heat, or price… Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood to spend half a day shopping around the GuangHua Computer Market (Bade Rd) to save a couple of hundred dollars, so I just took what seemed acceptable.
The hard drive is now almost full, so I’m about to remove it from the case and install another…
Wow, I think I’m behind the curve after a summer abroad…80 GB sounds great as a detachable option!! (Audio files…they’re huge!!) Might have to get one…
Obviously the terms I gave above are for those little “stick” type things that go on your USB port, not this kind of hard drive. And yeah, in Taiwan I guess just pronouncing “HD” as “aitch-uh-dee” will probably do the trick, if you throw in “wai jie” with it. (We once did a conference on computers and the delegates didn’t like us using the Chinese words for computer parts – asked us to just say “screen” etc. in English. It was annoying.)
Important Taiwanese Logic Formulae (#43-6a):
White = Foreigner = American = You must not be able to speak Chinese = Your sole purpose to the Chinese race is to teach us English … for free = when you do speak Chinese I freak out because my parents let me sit in the stroller until I was eight and now I still live with my parents after married = Then I get annoyed that I’m not using YOU as MY free personal English tutor = I get indignant and ask you to “please” speak the English that I don’t understand anyway = That makes me feel “international” and “high-class” = Until I start speaking Taiwanese in the meeting so you don’t understand = What? You understand Taiwanese! How dare you! That’s our special super-secret language. Now I really hate this foreigner = All foreigners are here to take our women and break our traffic laws.
I have to confess, I’m not particularly interested in taking their women. 
I bought one of those little puppies (HDD, not a woman) last year when the internal drive on my laptop started being unreliable. Copied all my data onto it, used it to port work between home and work, and generally consider it to be a worthwhile five grand spent.
When the laptop finally died I only lost a few days of material. Plugged the external drive in, and left it dumping onto the new machine while I went to the pub. As I had even thought to copy my software CDs, and record the serial numbers in a txt file, it was a doddle to be all configured with everything I use - even my browser/mail profile - in less than a morning.
Can’t recommend these things enough, especially if you take the trouble to back up regularly.
Win XP comes with the driver pre-installed. You have to install, once, from CD for (I think) Win 98 or earlier.
You can just plug the thing in to use it, but remember to click the icon to tell the computer before you unplug again.