Need more access more often? The Western Digital my passport and LaCie mobile drive are good everyday options. If you’re on a budget and just want to stick stuff away for safekeeping, a hard disk drive like the Western Digital elements portable will serve your needs ably, with good build quality and solid functionality at a very handy price point. The key thing to weigh up is exactly what ratio of pounds to storage space you’re prepared to pay for. That comes with a hefty price bump, though. They’re still more expensive per gigabyte of storage than HDDs, but as they’re not reliant on mechanical parts to write data (HDDs puts your data on a spinning disc, which means it’s more likely to fail or degrade sooner than an SSD which holds data on flash memory chips), SDDs tend to be more stable and way quicker to read and write data. If you’re serious about laying down data for the next few decades, an SSD is a better bet. Most pressingly, you need to decide whether you’re after a hard disk drive (HDD) or a solid state drive (SSD). But there’s a fair amount more to it than that. You could be forgiven for thinking that the external hard drive landscape is dotted with roughly identical and entirely anonymous black boxes, and that the only differences between them are in the number of LEDs they have.

Noticed that your laptop has started running slower and slower? Investing in a decent external hard drive is a cheaper alternative to renewing your machine – farming out some of the data and files you want to keep but don’t dip into all the time helps give an older machine a new lease on life.

That’s not the only reason you ought to be looking at an extra hard drive either.

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