You'll only see the speed benefits of Thunderbolt, however, if you have a drive that's SSD-based, or a multi-drive, platter-based desktop DAS that is set up in a RAID array. For ordinary external hard drives, Thunderbolt is very much the exception, not the rule. It tends to show up mainly in products geared toward the Mac market. 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. For mechanical hard disks, the very fastest drives max out at 2Gbits/sec so there’s no need to go beyond USB 3.2 Gen 1. Are there any extra features worth having? 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. This means that much of the speed will be wasted on the Xbox Series S/X and PS5 consoles, where the P50 could be used to store games you aren’t playing or run last-generation titles. On a fast PC with the right connection, though, it’s an absolute beast. It’s also happy working in the most demanding content creation apps, making it one powerful and versatile external drive.

Then, all the names changed: not once, but twice. And, just in case this was all too easy for you, the USB standards body has also dreamt up the term “SuperSpeed” and added that into the mix too.External hard drives come in various storage space amounts any from 1 terabyte all the way up to 24 terabytes and almost everything between. What does an external hard drive do? RAID (redundant array of inexpensive drives) which is a smart way of either improving your drive speed - at the cost of reliability - or improving reliability - at the cost of capacity. It was all so simple once upon a time. USB 3 was your baseline. It offered a theoretical transfer rate of up to 5Gbits/sec (with real-world speeds closer to 300MB/sec). Then you had USB 3.1, offering speeds up to 10Gbits/sec and USB 3.2 delivering speeds up to 20Gbits/sec. 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. Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

It’s also built to withstand working in extreme conditions, thanks to an ultra-rugged aluminium and rubber enclosure that’s IP68 dust and water resistant, 3m drop resistant and 4,000lb crush resistant. It is extremely pricey, but if you want the fastest, toughest drive in town, then you’re just going to have to pony up the dough.READ NEXT: The best external hard drives for PS4 | The best external hard drives for Xbox One Should I buy an SSD? Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority are available from us on request. Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. Perhaps the only thing you don't need to pay all that much attention to is the warranty. Sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps? Sure, a long warranty is nice. But if your drive breaks because you dropped it, the warranty likely won't cover that, anyway. Even if the drive fails because of a manufacturing defect, most warranties simply replace the drive and don't cover the cost of recovery services that attempt to rescue your data from the broken drive. The real value lies in what's on your drive, not the drive itself. Admin said:Here are the best external hard drives and SSDs for the money. These drives offer the best balance of performance, features and price.

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. 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. Transfers that used to take ten or 20 minutes suddenly happen in a minute or less. What kind of connectivity should I look for?

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An external hard drive is basically a drive that provides storage space. While a computer’s internal hard drive delivers storage within the computer, an external hard drive is portable and comes in various amounts of storage space. How much does an external hard drive cost? 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 I think one metric for comparing storage is to look at Sustained Write Performance as well, because it affects anyone who needs to do a large write: whether it's just once a week, or else many times a day. Used as a USB Type-C drive, the SanDisk Pro G40 does nothing to justify its high price. Sequential read/write speeds (1,055MB/sec and 1,012MB/sec in our tests) are nothing special, and its random read/write speeds aren’t particularly fast. However, plug it into a Mac, or a laptop with a Thunderbolt 4 port, and you’ll unleash a monster. On Thunderbolt 4, the Pro G40 posted read speeds of 3.15GB/sec and write speeds of 2.6GB/sec, making it the fastest drive we’ve ever tested. And nothing else even gets close for random read/write speeds.

Provided you have a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2×2 PC or laptop you can expect read speeds in excess of 1700MB/sec, with write speeds around 30MB/sec slower. Over a straight USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection, both read and write speeds stabilise at around 965MB/sec, which isn’t a massive improvement over 2020’s 1050MB/sec model. Yet it’s the random read/write speeds that are really impressive, reaching up to 206MB/sec and 226MB/sec, making this a good drive for apps and games as well as media. Looking for maximum performance for your most demanding applications? This is one of the strongest options. Given that even our fastest USB Type-C drive – the Kingston XS2000 – could only reach 2GB/sec over USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, that’s extremely impressive. From editing 4K, or even 8K, video to gaming, there’s nothing that this drive can’t handle. The LaCie 2big RAID array promises the reliability and delivers the performance benefit you'd expect from 7,200rpm platters, magnified by the default RAID 0 setting, while the optional RAID 1 setting is available if you want data redundancy. (A JBOD mode is also available if you don't want to use RAID.) Who It's ForAlso 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. You can trust LaCie to bring a little style to storage, and its latest Mobile Drive is another distinctive effort, with an angular, all-aluminium design enhanced by diamond-cut edges and a choice of space grey and moon silver MacBook-matching finishes. But while the looks are important, they’re not all this drive has to rely on. Hard drives may get you more capacity for your dollar by far, but first you need to consider a major difference in external storage these days: the hard drive versus the SSD.