The larger models with vast amounts of storage are often known as desktop drives.
Search for an external hard drive on Amazon or Currys and you are likely to see two main acronyms: HDD (hard disk drive) and SSD (solid-state drive). Again, how much protection you need will always be dependent on how you’re using it. Some external drives are designed with durability in mind, made with chunkier drop-resistant casings that will withstand bumps or surprise falls.
Most will need to be placed on a desk and may also need a wall charger for power. Generally, most of the drives with 1-4TB will fit in a coat pocket or travel bag but if you need more storage - think 6TB and up - the drive likely won’t be just as portable. You will need to consider if the external hard drive will sit on your desk, or if you will want to take it with you while venturing out of the house. The basic concept of external hard drive storage is similar to smartphones: the more you want, the more expensive the device will be. In 2022, it’s common for external hard drives to be fairly cost-effective (sub £100) for as much as 4TB. If you are storing a mixture of formats - whether that’s a backup of your Adobe projects or your many years of school work – you may decide to go even higher. This is a common number for external hard drives and will hold about 250,000 digital photos, around 250 movies or approximately 200,000 songs.
Documents, images and even movies won’t take up too much space, but a couple of your favourite PS5 console games or an entire laptop backup will.įor an external hard drive, we recommend not going below one terabyte (TB) of storage, which equates to a little over 1,000 gigabytes (GB). How much storage you need to buy depends on what you will be filling the drive with.
Top external drives: our recommendationsĮxternal hard disk being connected to a laptop. Also in the market for a new computer? Be sure to read our guide to the best budget laptops.Īll pricing in this article was correct at the time of publication. We will explain everything in this guide, and recommend some top external hard drives that will offer you a range of storage capacities and speeds. You will need to think about what ports are on your computer, how much space you actually need, how portable you require the external drive to be and whether it should be HDD or SSD. If those things don't bother you, this drive is tiny, cheaper, and comes with a padded rubber case.But an external hard drive is not just a place to toss some old photos – it can be hugely helpful for larger backups – giving you peace of mind that content is safe and won’t be deleted or corrupted should your computer or laptop break.īut hold on a second before simply buying the external hard drive with the most capacity – there’s a little more to it than that. I could find no pattern to this sometimes it appeared right away, sometimes it took a couple of minutes. The other issue is that sometimes it's very slow to be recognized by my PC. If you're trying to work with it in your lap, it can be downright uncomfortable. It's smaller and slightly faster than the OWC, but it has two drawbacks. I also like that you can swap out the drive inside the aluminum casing (it's easy to unscrew), which means two years from now, you can pick up a faster bare SSD and drop it in the Elektron.Īnother indestructible drive: I really like Sabrent's Rocket Nano SSD ($160 for 1 TB). It's tough to pick a winner here because there are many solid options, but OWC's Elektron drive narrowly beat others in benchmark tests. If you need a drive that can stand up to life in a backpack or camera bag, get wet, or handle a drop onto hard surfaces, OWC drives are your best choice.
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