WD 3TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0

Product Information

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. Cloud functionality, which allows individuals and businesses to operate a personal cloud. Essentially your very own cloud storage solution.

If you deal with any sensible information leaving it in an unencrypted drive is risky. While encryption can be done in software with a high degree of fine-tuning, nothing beats a purely hardware-based solution that frees you from the software-configuration complexities. A collection of spinning drives configured with a RAID level designed for faster data access can approximate the speeds of a basic SSD, while you should consider a drive with support for RAID levels 1, 5, or 10 if you're storing really important data that you can't afford to lose. Hit the link above for an explanation of the traits and strengths of each RAID level. Some require you to sacrifice raw capacity for data redundancy, so you'll want to pay attention to the nuances of each level. In addition to their physical shape differences, USB ports on the computer side will variously support USB 3.0, 3.1, or 3.2, depending on the age of the computer and how up to date its marketing materials are. You don't have to worry about the differences among these three USB specs when looking at ordinary hard drives, though. All are inter-compatible, and you won't see a speed bump from one versus the other in the hard drive world. The drive platters' own speed is the limiter, not the flavor of USB 3. The LaCie 2big RAID desktop array offers cavernous capacity to creative types and others who need to store and work with massive amounts of data. Available in capacities up to 16TB when we reviewed it, it has since added even higher volume, up to a monstrous 40TB. 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.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 For Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs. The next size up for consumer desktop drives is about the same height but twice as wide, to accommodate more than one platter-based hard drive mechanism in the chassis. These larger models are more expensive but also much more capacious—think 24TB or more (in that case, populated by two 12TB drive mechanisms). In the case of these and single-platter-drive products, you're not meant to swap out the drive or drives inside. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

Desktop hard drives are cheaper per Terabyte, offer capacities above 20TB, usually perform better but they are much larger and require an external power supply unit. Note that various vendors use different nomenclatures. WD confusingly has two categories - external drives and portable drives - but includes products in the latter category in the former one while archrival Seagate categorizes them as desktop drives and portable drives. You will note that they removed the word "hard" and that's for a good reason: increasingly portable drives are based on flash components and in a near future - given the rapid drop in hardware pricing - we wouldn't be surprised to see multiple SSDs combined in a "desktop drive" How to choose the best external hard drive for you 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. 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.

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 A desktop hard drive with a single platter-based mechanism inside, or a portable hard drive, is far more likely to make use of plain old USB instead. Almost every recent drive we have reviewed supports USB, and the same goes for laptops and desktops. USB ports are ubiquitous, and many external drives now come with cables with both rectangular USB Type-A connectors and oval-shaped USB Type-C ones to enable adapter-free connections to PCs that have only one type. If the drive includes only a single cable, you may need an adapter, depending on your computer's available USB ports. Be mindful of that. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) 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. Not only is it faster to read and write data stored in flash cells, but it's also safer. Because there is no spinning platter or moving magnetic head, if you bump the SSD while you're accessing its data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable. (Credit: Molly Flores) How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is second only to the type of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data. These connection types are ever in flux, but these days, most external hard drives use a flavor of USB, or in rare cases, Thunderbolt.

If you buy a larger desktop drive with two or more discrete spinning-platter drive mechanisms inside, you'll almost certainly have the option to configure the drive as a RAID array using included software. Depending on which RAID level you choose, you can prioritize capacity, speed, or data redundancy, or some combination thereof. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) Historically more than 200 companies have been producing these device, among those prominent brands are Western Digital, Toshiba, Transcend, Seagate and Adata. If you consider the types we have 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB types in the variety at best price. Online Delivery all around the Country That said, as a platter-based hard drive, it's best equipped to store a game library; you're better off loading the games you're currently playing from an SSD. If you conservatively figure an average game size of 100GB, the 4TB version tested here can hold about 40 titles, serving as the stylish main repository of your collection for years to come, and for a much more modest outlay than you'd spend on an SSD of similar capacity. Who It's For Most gamers should be able to store their entire collection on the Gaming Hub. Despite its name, the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hub is also good for storing movies, photos, and most any other files you might want to store. And it fits in with any gaming setup with its cool RGB lighting.The 2022 iteration of the LaCie Mobile Drive is a good choice for anyone who values capacity over speed, and who appreciates a rare touch of elegance in a platter-based hard drive. It costs a tad more per gigabyte than much of its platter-based ilk, but less than SSDs of equivalent capacity. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells—similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM—to save data. If you have a large media-file collection—perhaps you are a photo or video editor, or maybe a movie buff—you'll likely need several terabytes of space in which to store it. In that case, your best option is a desktop-class hard drive. We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives inside and requiring a dedicated power cable plugged into AC power to work. (Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.) (Credit: Molly Flores)