Best External Hard Drive

When considering the best external hard drive to buy there are a number of factors of which you need to be aware. Hard drive capacity, what will be stored, ease of use, who will use it and your budget.

Hard drive capacity and what will be stored are linked, but lets look at some examples of practical storage capacity.

A single photograph taken on your phone could be 500 KB and one taken on a digital camera could be 3 or 4 MB.

A music CD is approximately 650 MB or 0.65 GB

A movie will take 4 - 8 GB storage space and in high definition up to 16 GB.

In general terms

1000 Kb = 1 MB (Megabyte)

1000 MB = 1 GB (Gigabyte)

1000 GB = 1 TB (Terabyte)

1000 TB = 1 PB (Petabyte)

It is probably best to buy the largest capacity external hard drive you can afford. File sizes for computer programs are constantly increasing in size with each new release. Windows 7 Enterprise edition is 2.23 GB.

If you intend to do any sort of video editing then the speed at which data on the hard drive can be accessed will be important and this is down to the spin speed of the disk measured in rpm (revolutions per minute). Most drives have an rpm of either 5400 or 7200. However there are now available external hard drives with rpms of 10000 or even 15000. Streaming this data will require a high spped connection of either usb 3.0 or firewire 800. Admittedly video editing is a specialist use and for most people a spin speed of 7200 rpm with a usb 2.0 connection will work just fine.

An external hard drive can not only store images audio and video files but just as importantly can back up your work as you are doing it. The software that comes with the hard drive is therefore important in terms of ease of use.

Plug and play is the ideal where you plug your new external hard drive into a usb or firewire connection and the device then examines your hard drive and then asks you to confirm what you would like backed up or alternatively will back up the entire hard drive. Better still, once the initial backup is done the software will only backup new files or work that you do.

Lets face it, who has not forgotton to backup their work at one time or another but now your files will be automatically backedup. No worry. No hassle. That's technology working for us, not making life more difficult for once.

Who will use it could be rephrased to how many computers will be connected to the external hard drive. If you have more than one computer to back up then you will need a hard drive that can connect to your network and also the software to support the connections.

Finally your budget as always will be the deciding factor in choosing the best external hard drive for you. Go for the biggest fastest and easiest to use external hard drive and do not forget to check external hard drive reviews.