How To Find The Fastest External Hard Drive?
- Filed under Technology
If you are looking for a fast external hard drive, then I’ve got some tips for you! I have been doing some research as I want to get a decent external HDD for myself, and I came across quite a few different things that I think we should all take in to account. I think that finding the fastest external hard drive is not all just about finding the fastest data transfer connection to use, but it has quite a bit more to do with the type of use you have for it. Let me elaborate a bit more on that.
First of all, most of us use external hard drives to store large amount of data. They are merely data storage units which you will put your family photos on and only look back occasionally. For that, the speed of the drive doesn’t really matter as you usually are not accessing data all the time and when you write the files on the disk, you know it’s going to take a long time – why not leave the process on the background while you are doing something else. Nothing wrong with that.
Some of us don’t like to take too much time when doing this, or we just want to use the drive differently. The available external magnetic hard drives have quite a lot of differences in the speed depending on how you use them. Drives which work very well for large files, and have short write and read times for files that are larger than a ten or even a hundred megabytes, are great for someone who wants to use the drive to store huge amounts of data such as movies, home videos, family photos etc. For someone who wants to keep their mp3 collection on the drive and needs it to be readily accessible without delay, another drive could do the trick.
There are hard drives that have very short seek times, but on the other hand take longer time to read and write, are the drives that work better for someone who uses them for smaller files that are accessed more frequently. For example, if you would be using the drive merely for a backup drive for your desktop computer or laptop, having a faster seek time would be beneficial – automated backups usually only perform small changes frequently. Once you have moved the majority of files to drive initially, there isn’t much that needs to be transferred anymore. There will be lots of daily access where the new files will be updated on the backup drive, and that is where a drive with fast seek times for small files will be the fastest external hard drive for you.
When it comes to connecting the drive to your computer, keep in mind that the disk already has limitations. If you think that by getting a USB 3.0 drive that has the theoretical speed of 5 GB/s will actually work at that speed, you are wrong. The drives will not be able to read and write data at this speed, so the limiting factor is going to be something else. Right now hard drives are behind when it comes to transfer rates of the USB and it might take 2-3 years before they will catch up. Is it reasonable to think that if you purchase an USB 3.0 external hard drive today, that it will still be working in 2-3 years when your computer will be able to handle the speed? Also the disk inside the external drive won’t be fast enough. Conclusion? USB 3.0 doesn’t guarantee a fast external hard drive at the moment, but give it a few years and we’ll be able to enjoy lightning fast external disks.