Can you recommend a good external hard drive?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
askleo.com. Here's a question I got.
I plan to follow your suggestions for backing up.
Great.
But having never used an external drive,
I'm overwhelmed with the choices and could use some direction.
Can you recommend some guidelines?
Two and a half inches or three and a half inches, 5,400 versus 7,200 RPM.
How big? Which brands are the most reliable?
Et cetera.
Can I make a specific recommendation? No, I can't.
The problem is the landscape keeps
changing much too quickly for any recommendation I might make today
to potentially have relevance a month from now or a year from now.
Instead, what I want to do is I want
to walk through some of those choices that you can make along the way and give
you some guidelines to basically make the choices that are right for you.
Let's start with physical size,
two and a half inches versus three and a half inches.
I have several two and a half inch drives.
They are convenient.
They are drives that I can easily throw into my backpack when I'm traveling.
They typically don't require external power.
They get all the power they need from their USB connection.
The downside is that they tend to be a little bit slower.
They are definitely 5,400 in most cases.
If they're spinning platters at all, then I'll talk about SSDs in a minute.
But if they're going to be spinning platters, which I typically recommend
for external hard drives, they're going to be the slower 5,400 RPM ones.
The good news, though, is that because they are small because
they are built for portability, they tend to be slightly more rugged.
Those are very convenient for external
drives that you might be taking with you when you travel or just have other needs
for physically taking taking the drive from place to place.
Now, the other size, of course, are the three and a half inch drives,
these are the bigger drives that actually are usually the drives that are inside
desktop computers just pulled out and put into a box.
They are typically faster.
They are indeed typically 7,200 RPM.
And the three and a half inch drives tend
to give you a little bit more for your dollar.
Those are great, though, for putting on your desk next to you,
typically because they do require external power most of the time.
I have one here that I use as my backup drive for my primary machine.
It's an external drive, it's 5 terabytes,
but indeed, I have to plug in an additional power
supply that then plugs into that drive to keep it going.
I've talked a little bit about speed already.
5,400 tends to be common in the smaller drives.
7,200 seems to be more common in the three and a half inch drives.
There's even 10,000 out there somewhere, which supposedly would be really fast.
For an external drive, that is complete overkill.
I don't believe you need that.
My sense is that this isn't something you really need to think about a lot
for an external drive you're going to be using primarily for backups.
The difference for data transfer rates while it will be there.
It's typically overshadowed by the speed of your USB connection.
So whether you're running 5,400 or 7,200,
you may not even notice that there's a difference.
Like I said, for external drives that aren't in constant use,
like the disks inside your machine, it really doesn't matter.
I will say that it is not
a number that I look at when I am looking for an external drive.
The number I do look at is capacity.
I want, like I said earlier, the biggest bang for my buck.
My backup drive, as I said, is 5 terabytes.
That's a fine, fine size for me.
Whether it's the right size for you, I can't say.
The things to think about, especially if you're using this,
specifically and only for backups, is how big are your backups?
If you're doing image backups,
you can ballpark around two-thirds of the actual data use on your primary drive.
I say two-thirds because
backup programs typically compress what they're backing up, so they end up taking
less space than they do on your actual disk.
For example, I have a one terabyte drive here on my machine.
I've got maybe 500 gigabytes of it actually used, so it's 500 gigabytes
that I would use as the number to start considering.
If I take two-thirds of that,
that's in the 350-380 range, 50-380 gigabyte range per backup.
So how many backups do you want to keep?
I tend to keep one month's worth of a full backup in its 30 some odd incrementals
plus another month, and then maybe a A third month's full backup only.
I might have three full backups that would take up the maximum amount that I just
talked about in that 400 gigabyte range, and the 30 incrementals,
the up to 30 incrementals for each of the two most recent ones.
How big those get depend on how much changes on your machine from day to day.
If nothing else, there's nothing wrong at all with having too much space.
My original backup drives were on the order of 500 gigabytes.
I don't think you can find those anymore.
In fact, I think I'm having a hard time finding one terabyte drives anymore.
Two terabytes, five terabytes.
Look at the price per terabyte and make a decision that works well
for your budget and has enough room to keep as many
backups as you expect to be able or to want to keep.
Typically, it's not going to be that long.
Typically, the drives are going to be much bigger than you actually need right now.
Brands is the question that I cannot answer.
I say that not because there isn't a good brand today.
There probably is.
The problem is that in my experience, and this is now over 20 years worth
of looking at this stuff, brand stability, brand quality is cyclical.
Today, brand A will be good.
Brand B will be problematic.
A year from now, their roles often reverse so that brand B is the better one to get.
My recommendation in this case is to, A, get a name brand.
Seagate, Hitachi, there are some others.
We'll talk about the one that I'm actually using here in a moment.
But make sure you recognize the name or you see the name
prominently as recommended drives by others that are current.
For those articles, when you're looking at which hard drive
to get, make sure you pay attention to the date,
because like I said, the answer keeps changing.
Now, my external hard drive,
the five terabyte one I just mentioned to you, that's actually a G technology drive.
Now, G technology doesn't make hard drives.
They make enclosures into which they put hard drives.
They have a reputation for quality.
They're a little bit more expensive.
I've got two of them, and they've been lasting great.
I haven't had a problem with either of them.
My belief, and this is just a belief,
is that they're doing some of that research so you don't have to.
They're not tied to a specific hard drive manufacturer,
and they will probably put in the one that's appropriate at the time.
That's just a guess.
Now, the other thing that people come back with are SSDs.
What about SSDs?
Okay, let's talk about SSDs.
Remember, the focus here for your external drive is primarily backup.
So The speed advantage you get with SSDs is typically wasted.
They often don't really write that much faster than a traditional hard drive.
When you're backing up, it's writing that you're doing the most of anyway.
Yes, they read a lot quicker.
Great.
The problem, of course, is that SSDs, A, they don't come in the same sizes as big
as these hard drives I've been talking about, and they're more costly.
My take is that at At this point, while you certainly can use an SSD
for an external drive, I have no problem with doing it, it's just not worth it.
If anything,
if you end up in a situation where you have an SSD that you're taking out of
a machine of yours, then you might repurpose it as an external drive.
If you do so, it's a great portable drive because with no moving parts,
it's the most resilient of all for the bumps and that might happen during travel.
That's my recommendation.
You don't really need to use SSDs for external drives.
There's no harm in doing it, but it's actually not really worth it.
What's the bottom line here?
Well, the bottom line, of course, is back up.
Honestly, part of me says, I don't care how you do it.
I do care, but what's more important than whether or not you make me happy about how
you're doing it is that you actually do it.
Get yourself an external drive that makes sense based on some of the ideas that I've
talked about here, and start backing up regularly.
It is the one thing.
It's the closest thing we have to a silver bullet in computing.
It can protect you from almost anything.
That's why I invest so much time in it.
Remember, if you're using an external
drive to actually just store some data, you can use it for other things
in addition to your backup, make sure that data is in more than one place.
Just because you've copied it or moved it
to a drive you call your backup drive does not mean it's backed up.
If it's in only one place, it's not backed up.
Even if that place has the backup label on it.
For updates, for comments, for links to related articles and more, visit
askleo.com/12028.
I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.