How to Buy a Portable Hard Drive
There are plenty of portable USB hard disk drives on the market to choose from, and truthfully most of them can do what you need them to do just fine. There are, however, a few things you should consider when buying a portable external hard drive. In this guide, I review (what I believe) are the main things to consider when making your decision where drive to purchase.
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Performance
The transfer speed of your drive is obviously the main factor in how the drive performs, or even in other words, how fast it is possible to copy files both to and from it. Since most people use external drives to backup large files including personal photos, movies, and music, it is important that the drive you purchase can transfer large files quickly. Transfer speeds are often measured in megabits per second (mb/s) or gigabits per second (gb/s). The deciding step to consider here is whether you need to go with a drive that employs USB “SuperSpeed” 3.0 or even the older legacy USB 2.0. Transfer rates for USB 3.0 enabled drives are typically around 3 times like a USB 2.0 drive in tangible world tests. Since drives which use USB 3.0 are backward suitable for USB 2.0 ports, we recommend choosing a USB 3.0 enabled device to enable you to take advantage of the faster speeds. Note that you will need to have a USB 3.0 port on your machine to take good thing about the faster transfer speeds, but USB 3.0 ports are becoming more standard on modern computers. (Transfer speeds for drives of similar USB speed will change slightly from drive to drive, but the difference is negligible.) There are other connection types too such as FireWire and eSATA along with the new Thunderbolt interface, which can be on the newer macs, but for the vast majority of users we recommend the USB since it is the most prevalent.
Storage capacity is the other factor to look into in regards to performance. Portable hard drives are available in sizes as large as 3TB’s, although the most popular dimensions are 1TB, which should be adequate for the average user. A 500GB drive is a good size to select as it still provides lots of storage but at usually about 30-40% less than the similar 1TB drive.
Features
One of the most important feature to think about in a portable drive relates to security. Specifically, you will want to consider the level of encryption and password protection that comes with a drive. Since by their nature portable hard disk drives are more likely to be lost or stolen than the usual desktop drive, it is vital that you can keep your data safe. Therefore, we recommend using a drive that offers encryption and password protection. Additionally, many drives come with additional software to handle things like periodic, automated backups. So if you plan to use the drive for copying your data, we recommend you decide to go with a drive that comes with backup software. Finally, think about the warranty coverage of your drive. Most will include a typical 2 year warranty, which is important because all hard drives, regardless of type or brand, potentially have to fail.
Design
In my experience, one of the biggest factors in selecting which drive is the best for you is the physical style of the drive. The reason being after you decide on what speed and size you would like, you’ll find that prices don’t vary a lot of from drive to operate a vehicle and so you might as well choose the one that you think looks the most effective. Some designs will probably be smaller or lighter than these, some designs could have different colors or textures for your case enclosure, and a few designs will include some sort of shock or drop protection. (The best of which will be the so-called ‘military spec or grade’ drives, which can typically withstand drops of countless feet with no damage or loss of data.) In the end, you should pick a form factor which is most attractive to you because most portable drives will be compact and lightweight.
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