The best external hard drives are affordable and long-lasting. But the best drive for you depends on what you need your drive to do. Do you need huge storage space? Do your need low power consumption? Do you need something so rugged you could play football with it? Let's look at the best external hard drives in each of these different categories.
The Best External Drives For Storage
The best external drives for storage space will all be magnetic hard drives. These drives can fit terabytes worth of data into a relatively compact space.
The trade off is that even the best external hard drives based on magnetic technology will draw significant power, so these drives will never be ideal for use with laptops or other portable devices.
Since a drive with terabytes of space is a significant investment, you want to do your research to find the best external hard drives by looking at the manufacturer-not the customer reviews of a particular recent model.
Magnetic drives typically fail after three to five years of use, so recently released models don't have enough history for you to determine whether they'll last. Look instead at older customer reviews of hard drives made more than a year ago and see what trends you can detect among drives made (or sold) by major manufacturers. A manufacturer who produced high-quality drives two years ago is probably still producing high-quality drives today.
The Best For Low Power
If you want to use your external drive to watch video on the road, or any other task which benefits from low-power consumption, you're probably looking for a Solid State Drive (SSD). The best onr to buy in this category are small and only require a single cord to connect to your computer.
The main drawbacks of SSD drives are that they cost more per gigabyte and they don't offer as much space as a large magnetic drive. On the upside, SSDs can be the best for on-the-go users because they're smaller and faster.
When shopping for an SSD, remember that the lifetime of the drive is determined by the number of write cycles available on the solid state medium, so a cheaper drive with fewer available write cycles is probably not as good a deal as a slightly more expensive drive with several times as many write cycles.
A common problem with SSDs is firmware problems. These tend to reveal themselves quickly, so scan the recent customer reviews to find which are the best devices for you.
Hard Drives For Robustness
Maybe you're a klutz, or maybe you have a demanding profession. Or maybe you have some other reason which requires a nearly indestructible external disk. In any case, you'll also want a solid state drive.
But don't look at the typical SSDs if you're trying to find the best external hard drives. Instead look at the ruggedized SSDs. These typically have a tougher case and recessed connections so they're harder to damage or break.
Ruggedized drives may also include special features such being waterproof or offering hardware encryption. Since these features rarely add much to the already high price of a ruggedized drive, these are often the best external hard drives.
Hi my name Mitz Pantic from Tips4pc.com. Many people do not even know what an external hard drive is, let alone have one. They have been around for years and are very handy for file backup and storage.
If you are thinking about purchasing a drive, please read my external hard drive buying guide to help you choose the best external hard drive for you.
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