Choosing the best hard disk drives, external drives and storage: ITReviews.com Buyer's Guide - page 2
hard drives and external drives
08 August, 2011 by IT Reviews Staff
EXTERNAL STORAGE DRIVES
If you're not quite confident enough to start fiddling around inside your PC, or if you're looking for a portable solution to your storage needs that you can swap between different machines, think about an external hard drive. While you'll pay a premium over the cost of an internal drive of the same capacity, the cost isn't usually that much higher. Sadly, it will come at a cost of performance: with certain exceptions, external drives just don't work as quickly as an internal equivalent of the same specification.
USB
Most external hard drives use USB 2.0, the second-generation version of the Universal Serial Bus standard. This allows for reasonably fast read speeds, and carries enough power - if you use the supplied double-ended cable - to run a smaller 2.5in drive without the need to plug it into the mains. While that's not a requirement for desktop users, it's a handy thing to have for a drive you'll use with a laptop - and certainly worth paying the few pounds extra it costs to get one that is 'bus-powered,' as the technology is known.
Some portable disk drives such as Iomega's eGo are designed with rugged shock protection.
Some newer drives use the USB 3.0 standard, which is even faster and approaches the speed of modern internal connectivity such as SATA. These are still relatively rare, but if you're looking to splash out it's a good option, as it's backwards-compatible with USB 2.0. A USB 3.0 hard drive will work (albeit at a reduced speed) on almost any system using USB 2.0, and will reveal its hidden potential as and when you upgrade.
FireWire (IEEE 1394)
Those looking to add external storage to an older Apple Mac might want to look into FireWire, technically known as IEEE 1394. Although not as popular as USB, FireWire offers impressive transfer speeds, and drives equipped with the right port can be had fairly cheaply.
If you're looking for a device you can use on multiple systems, however, FireWire isn't the best choice: PCs rarely include FireWire ports, and Apple has recently dropped them in favour of the new Thunderbolt port on its latest models.
Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt, if your system has it, is a great choice: offering up to 10Gbit/s of aggregate performance, a Thunderbolt port even eclipses the speed of SATA for data transfer. Sadly, unless you've got one of the very latest Apple Macs, it's not an option - and even if you're lukcy enough to have one of these new machines, Thunderbolt drives are still thin on the ground. ESATA - for External SATA - is another choice if you absolutely need the fastest speeds, but check their power requirements: most ESATA drives need to be connected to the mains, making them less portable than a USB equivalent.
USB flash memory drives
For smaller files, ultr-compact and pocketable USB memory drives - often 'thumb drives' because of their diminutive size - are the best option. These come with a USB plug built in, and generally transfer files by USB 2.0. Although an increasing number now take advantage of the theoretically faster speeds made possible by USB 3.0, in practice these lightning-fast file transfers are hampered by the drive's internal electronics, meaning that in real-world testing we haven't seen vast improvement.
