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In addition to storing large media collections, these drives can also serve as inexpensive repositories for backups of your computer's hard drive that you schedule, using either software that comes with the drive or a third-party backup utility. Most are roughly 5 inches tall and 2 inches wide. (Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.)Ī desktop drive with a single platter mechanism will typically use a 3.5-inch drive inside and comes in capacities up to 12TB, though a few 16TB single drives in external chassis have started to emerge. We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives inside and requiring a dedicated power cable plugged into AC power to work. In that case, your best option is a desktop-class hard drive.

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If you have a large media-file collection-perhaps you are a photo or video editor, or maybe a movie buff-you'll likely need several terabytes of space in which to store it.

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Physical Size Matters: Get a Desktop Drive, or a Portable One? And let's not even talk about the cost of 4TB and 8TB external SSDs. A 2TB SSD, though? Expect to pay at least two to three times as much as you would for that 2TB hard drive. You can find a 2TB portable hard drive with ease (possibly even a 4TB one, depending on the day) for less than $100. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.Īnd portable hard drives can be a great value if what you need is raw capacity above all else. Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Because there is no spinning platter or moving magnetic head, if you bump the SSD while you're accessing its data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable. Not only is it faster to read and write data stored in flash cells, but it's also safer. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature-length film, or a year's worth of family photos) to an external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning drive. External SSDs offer at least twice that speed and now, often much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps. Just how much faster is it to access data stored in flash cells? Typical read and write speeds for consumer drives with spinning platters are in the 100MBps to 200MBps range, depending on platter densities and whether they spin at 5,400rpm (more common) or 7,200rpm (less common). Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells-similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM-to save data. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. Hard drives may get you more capacity for your dollar by far, but first you need to consider a major difference in external storage these days: the hard drive versus the SSD.

Weighing the Need for Speed: Hard Drive or SSD? This guide will help you make sense of these and many more questions that arise while you're shopping for an external hard drive.

Other factors include the physical size of the drive (is it designed to be carted around, or to sit on your desk?), how rugged it is, the interface it uses to connect to your PC, and even what colors it comes in. The drive capacity is the most important factor to consider, and it can increase or decrease the cost dramatically depending on your needs. For about $50, you can add a terabyte of extra storage to your laptop or desktop by just plugging in a USB cable.Ĭhoosing an external drive isn't as simple as buying the most expensive one you can afford, however. They're ever more capacious for the money, too. But modern ones are faster, more stylish, and often more durable than their counterparts from a few years ago. In an era when 50GB of iCloud storage is 99 cents per month, and trim, slim external SSDs are getting cheaper, external hard drives, based on spinning platter disks, might appear less essential than they once were.

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