Then, all the names changed: not once, but twice. Then you had USB 3.1, offering speeds up to 10Gbits/sec and USB 3.2 delivering speeds up to 20Gbits/sec. It offered a theoretical transfer rate of up to 5Gbits/sec (with real-world speeds closer to 300MB/sec). This is a more complicated question than it should be, thanks in the main to the USB standards body’s inability to stick to a single, simple naming scheme. What kind of connectivity should I look for? Transfers that used to take ten or 20 minutes suddenly happen in a minute or less. And with read speeds anywhere between 500MB/sec and a staggering 3.2GB/sec (with the right connectivity – see below), you’ll be amazed how fast these things can go. SSDs are small and extremely robust, which makes them great for moving media libraries or big projects between PCs or transferring Steam games from your PC to your laptop. You still won’t get a whole lot of storage without spending major money but if you want something that can hold, say, 1TB of video or photos, you can find something suitably speedy for around £70 to £100 these days. READ NEXT: The best external hard drives for PS4 | The best external hard drives for Xbox One Should I buy an SSD?Įxternal SSDs used to be prohibitively expensive but a highly competitive market has now brought the price right down. You can easily find 6TB drives for around £100 to £120 and 10TB for £200 to £300. To make up for this, you’ll often get better performance with drives that spin at speeds of up to 7,200rpm and a larger cache to make file transfers smoother. These use larger 3.5in hard disks and require a dedicated power supply, which makes them less convenient. If you need more space, you’ll need to look at desktop drives. You can even find 5TB drives for around £100. You can easily pick up a 1TB drive for under £50 and a 2TB drive for around £20 more. The latest USB standards deliver transfer speeds that are plenty fast enough for most, so the biggest bottleneck will be the performance of the HDD contained within the housing. These feature 2.5in, 5,400rpm drives of the sort we used to see in laptops, housed in a toughened casing and using a single USB connection for both power and data transfer. Today, external drives come in three basic forms, the biggest and most popular category of which is the portable HDD. How to choose the best external hard drive for you What type of drive should I buy? They’re still brilliant for backups and archives, or even just storing games that you’re not planning to play right now. However, external HDDs still have their place, giving you 2TB to 4TB of storage (or more!) at a significantly lower price. External SSDs are now in the mainstream, giving you high speeds at 1TB to 2TB capacities without breaking the bank. The answer to these problems is an external drive. You might be tempted to use cloud storage but, while it is a great way to backup vital files, it’s not always practical when you have a lot of data or large media files that you need to safeguard. If you play games you can see 1TB go in just a handful of titles, with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War grabbing between 150 and 250GB on their own. That’s a problem when even budget smartphones can produce photos that take up 10 to 16MB of space, and hi-res audio files and 4K video files are even greedier. In fact, the recent shift from HDDs (hard disk drives) to SSDs (solid state drives) has meant that space has never been so tight – 256GB SSDs are still common, and only high-performance laptops and gaming PCs ship with 1TB or more. While computers keep growing ever more powerful, their storage never quite maintains the same pace.
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