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How To Buy External Hard Drive – External Hard Drive Buying Guide – If you are like other peoples, you have been slowly but surely storing media on your laptop or PC. Maybe you’ve 3,000+ photos sitting in folders on your Laptop, or maybe you are a music lover who has been downloading on-line like friends. Either way, that media takes up precious space on your laptop or PC and needs to be saved properly- External Hard Drives is the solution.
External hard drives promise almost limitless storage: For less than $100, you may add a TB (terabyte) of data to your PC or laptop. That is sufficient for over 700,000+ MP3 or photos, or over 200+ full movies files.
External Hard drives are still a key component in trendy computer architecture and it is normal to buy a new one every few years, either to replace an old external hard drive or to make use of as an extra for more space.
But with so many choices on the market, which one is best for you? Which one should you purchase?
The excellent news is that External hard drive purchasing is not all that tough— as long as you follow these guidelines, you would not have to worry about “buying the wrong External hard drive” or something like that.
Brand
Everybody has a horror story about a drive from Firm A or Firm B going south on them, together with a warning to steer clear of everything with a specific brand name on it. However, the fact is all drives fail at some point, no matter who is the maker of them. Your primary concerns should be the size of the particular drive and the warranty. 500 GB and 1 TB drives have been around for a very long time. 2 TB drives are newer but are now considered by most consumer watchdogs to be simply as reliable as 1 TB drives. Avoid 3 TB drives for the time being till they have been confirmed within the field. A two-year warranty is normal for many hard drives, but Three-year warranties are shortly turning into more common.
Hard Drive Types
The build quality of external hard drives varies fairly a bit. Models with plastic shells are usually cheaper than models with metallic ones. Metallic, of course, is much less prone to marring and crush damage. Particularly go for metallic if you will store your drive around casually in a bag or pocket—plastic drives are likely to scratch and gouge simply if you are not careful.
Storage Capacity
The storage capacity in the external hard drive can vary from about 2 GB to 4 TB. In reality, some drive firms put 2 4 TB drives in a single chassis, creating an 8 TB hard drive, which is complete overkill for most individuals. For reference, computers these days often come with anywhere between about 250 GB & 750 GB of space on the hard drive. Whether or not you need a mini external hard drive you can pin to your keychain and store a number of important documents on, or a significantly bigger one where you may keep your whole photos, songs, and movies, the possibilities are almost limitless. A smart size for individuals looking to store videos would be 1 or 2TB. If you are mostly just storing word documents and emails, a smaller one could do. The more files you wish to store, and the bigger the file type, the bigger you should go.
Transfer Speed
The efficiency of a consumer-level external hard drive is decided by many factors, but revolutions per minute (RPMs) is an important one. Greater RPMs means faster transferring of data to and from the drive.
Additionally, ignore the drive’s SATA speed. For instance, a modern drive might be listed as 3.0 GB/s and 7200 RPM. No external hard drive is ever going to be able to transfer data at speeds of 3.0 GB/s, but a 7200 RPM drive will all the time be faster than a 5400 RPM drive.
Access Times
The external hard drives have a few different factors that affect efficiency, such as the time it takes for the reader to position itself to read data from or write data to the drive.
While it is true that two 7200 RPM drives might have differing performances, e.g. one of them may be slower at repositioning the reader–there is no standard method to compare access times. Plus, most external hard drives perform at similar ranges nowadays, so I would not fear too much about this particular detail.
Safety
Make sure that your external hard drive comes with hardware-based encryption, which is extra reliable than software-based encryption. That is especially vital if you wish to buy a portable mobile drive to hold around, but it’s additionally important if you are storing highly delicate information. Carrying your personal information around makes them more liable to loss and theft, so go the additional step and make encryption a priority.
Use and Reliability
The software that comes with the hard drive tends to get ignored in the shuffle, but it may be a surprising worth—or totally forgettable.
Additionally, worthy of note is the up to date Dashboard software we have seen on Seagate’s 2014’s portables, the Backup Plus Quick, and Backup Plus Slim. With tools like these for straightforward backup and encryption on hand, you will be extra more likely to actually perform these backups that you purchased that drive for.
Pricing
Based on all the above, you are going to run into a wide range of prices for external hard drives that look very similar on the surface. It is as much as you to decide which factors are most related to your wants and to pick an external hard drive that fits these parameters. To find out value for money, divide the drive’s retail price by its storage to get a price per gigabyte.