WD 3TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0

Product Information

Thunderbolt ports, should you need to daisy-chain storage, devices and display. This is particularly useful at the high end of the market where creative professionals are particularly fond of this port How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is second only to the type of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data. These connection types are ever in flux, but these days, most external hard drives use a flavor of USB, or in rare cases, Thunderbolt. In addition to their physical shape differences, USB ports on the computer side will variously support USB 3.0, 3.1, or 3.2, depending on the age of the computer and how up to date its marketing materials are. You don't have to worry about the differences among these three USB specs when looking at ordinary hard drives, though. All are inter-compatible, and you won't see a speed bump from one versus the other in the hard drive world. The drive platters' own speed is the limiter, not the flavor of USB 3.

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). External SSDs offer at least twice that speed and now, often much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps for the slowest ones. 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. If you buy a larger desktop drive with two or more discrete spinning-platter drive mechanisms inside, you'll almost certainly have the option to configure the drive as a RAID array using included software. Depending on which RAID level you choose, you can prioritize capacity, speed, or data redundancy, or some combination thereof. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) WD sales literature will tell you this stores 150 games, but game sizes vary widely. The firm puts the average size per game at 36GB while some reviewers claim it's 80GB nowadays. In any case, it's a lot of storage to expand your gaming system. It is also well suited as long-term multimedia storage hooked up to a PC or large-screen smart TV from Sony or a recent Samsung as well - some smart TVs support NTFS and FAT32 or NTFS and ExFat, very rarely do they support all three file systems.A collection of spinning drives configured with a RAID level designed for faster data access can approximate the speeds of a basic SSD, while you should consider a drive with support for RAID levels 1, 5, or 10 if you're storing really important data that you can't afford to lose. Hit the link above for an explanation of the traits and strengths of each RAID level. Some require you to sacrifice raw capacity for data redundancy, so you'll want to pay attention to the nuances of each level. 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. 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. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. 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. Portable or external hard disk drives are dominant secondary storage devices for storing digital information that is usually pre-assembled or assembled by combining an external enclosure. These are available in two different sizes variants, 2.5-inch are typically known as portable external hard drives and 3.5-inch are known as desktop external drives. The concept of secondary storage was first introduced by IBM in the year of 1956. Over the passage of time it improves and in March 2015 it achieved the capacity volume from 500GB to 1TB. Upgrade to the Latest Portable HDD for Your On-The-GO Drive from Brands like Western Digital, Seagate, ADATA, and More

Like other products in the SanDisk Professional line, the G-Drive ArmorATD is strongly geared to Mac use. It's best for traveling Mac users looking for a drive that can withstand a tumble or a rainstorm and want better capacity for the price than they would get with an SSD.Most gamers should be able to store their entire collection on the Gaming Hub. Despite its name, the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub is also good for storing movies, photos, and most any other files you might want to store. And it fits in with any gaming setup with its cool RGB lighting.

Note that various vendors use different nomenclatures. WD confusingly has two categories - external drives and portable drives - but includes products in the latter category in the former one while archrival Seagate categorizes them as desktop drives and portable drives. You will note that they removed the word "hard" and that's for a good reason: increasingly portable drives are based on flash components and in a near future - given the rapid drop in hardware pricing - we wouldn't be surprised to see multiple SSDs combined in a "desktop drive" How to choose the best external hard drive for you Also know that you can find external drives that do way more than just store your data. Some include SD card readers to offload footage from a camera or drone in the field, while a few specialized models have built-in Wi-Fi and can double as a little media server, able to connect to more than one device at a time.

Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub

The LED lights at the front of the drive light up green for USB 2.0 and blue for USB 3.0 connection. Its wraparound USB cable -permanently attached at one end saves you from losing the cable but if you need a longer cable you'll have to use a male/female cable in between.