External Hard Drives

The most important thing to worry about when choosing a new external HDD drive is safety and reliability. You have to be able to rely on the fact your documents are safely stored and they will stay there for as long as you need them to. There are other factors such as data transfer speeds (essential for moving large files in and out), build quality and connectivity. Ultimately, you need to be able to get your data in and out as fast as possible.

One of the biggest deciding factors when it comes to data transfer rates is the ports the drive uses, and whether it is a standard HDD or a solid-state drive (SSD). Most external hard drives use USB 2.0 connections, which are not fast enough for today’s large file sizes. You will want at least USB 3.0 but ideally, it would be best of your external drive has USB Type-C connection (providing that you have a system also with the same type of USB Type-C port.

Think and plan how much storage you are likely to need. You might think 500GB is large enough but if you store video files or movies those 500GB will look pretty petty very soon. You don’t want to buy an external HDD that is too small, and end up running out of space, but neither do you really want to pay over the odds for storage space you’ll never need or use. We would recommend at least 2TB (terabyte) as that will future proof your investment, they can be quite small in size and give you room to store high-res photos and videos for years to come. If you work with large files or professional high-resolution images then 4TB or more is what you should consider.

The best external HDD drives these days are reliable and rugged, so you can safely store your data without any worry. They will (should) also be light enough to carry in your bag, with large capacities so that you can keep your data safe when travelling. There’s a huge range of external hard drives out there, it is so easy to get overwhelmed.