Choosing the Right External Hard Drive
External hard drives provide a useful backup for your data, as well as a good overflow when your computer's own drive gets full. Manufacturers like Seagate produce a lot of different designs, so it can be tricky to choose the right one for you.
How Much Hard Drive Space Do I Need?
- The amount of storage that you need on an external hard drive depends on what you want to store on it. Backing up important documents can require very little storage capacity. Storing a movie library will use up a lot more hard disk space.
- A 100 GB hard drive has space for around 25 DVD-quality movies or over 1500 hours of music. Bigger drives have even more space.
- An advantage of external drives is that you can have more than one of them. While upgrading your computer's internal drive can be inconvenient, owning more than one external hard drive is easy. Having several external hard drives can even help with organization if you keep pictures on one and music on another.
Which Other Features Should I Look For in a Portable Drive?
- Hard drives store data on a spinning disk. The faster that disk spins, the faster your computer can read data from it. Hard disks tend to be rated at either 5400 or 7200 RPM, but some drives are even faster.
- When using an external HDD, data transfer speeds are limited by the connection between the drive and your computer. Newer USB generations move more data per second than older ones. A USB 3.0 connection can transfer data at up to 4.8 GB per second, 10 times faster than the USB 2.0 standard.
- Size matters, and some external drives are more portable than others. If you want to carry your data around with you, choosing a small portable drive makes sense. If you just want it to sit next to your computer and store extra data, size is much less of a concern.
Should I Get a Solid State Drive Instead?
- Solid state drives are increasingly popular for both external and internal data storage, and manufacturers like Seagate typically make them as well as regular hard disks. Solid state drives have much faster read and write speeds as they don't rely on moving parts.
- Ordinary hard drives, on the other hand, can have much more capacity than solid state drives. High-capacity solid state drives are rarer and more expensive.
- Depending on how you use your external drive, the extra speed of an SSD may not be an advantage. If you mainly work with small files like word processing documents and individual pictures, you will see a lot less difference than if you are accessing movies or games.