Experience gold when choosing to buy an external hard drive

External hard drive (HDD) has become an indispensable component for office users. However, many people still do not know how to buy them.

The purpose of using external hard drive is storage. Obviously the criteria to note are storage capacity (in GB) data backup rate, connection standard and especially the durability of the product.

Classification of portable hard drives

The external hard drive is divided into two main categories: The 3.5-inch type requires a separate power cord along with a USB cable to transmit data, the second type is much smaller and lighter, has a size of 2 , 5 inches or 1.8 inches.

Unlike the first type, this type only uses one USB cable to both transfer data and power the hard drive. However, the 2.5-inch type is usually not as large as the first.

Select the manufacturer

On the market today there are many different hard drive firms such as Toshiba, Western Digital, Samsung, Transcend, Apacer, Adata, Seagate .

However, Western Digital and Seagate are still highly appreciated by Vietnamese users for the quality and durability of the products. These are also two manufacturers that have been present for a long time and have built a reputation in the Vietnamese market.

About warranty policy, Segate hard drive has the longest warranty period: 60 months. Of course its price is also a bit higher, the remaining companies warranty their products for 36 months.

Storage capacity

This is an important factor that users look at when choosing to buy mobile hard drives. Of course, the larger the capacity, the higher the product cost. So this is also the criterion that many users suffer the most.

Of course users need to base on the need to use to select the storage capacity of the hard drive. For an office worker, a hard drive with a capacity of 160GB is more than enough for storage needs. But what the hard drive is so important, is all your work results, and much more of your data for a long time, so don't hesitate to put in some extra money. for this device.

And considering the complete hard drive upgrade is not a reasonable economic decision, if you buy a 320 GB hard drive, but you still feel the lack of demand. You decide to buy an additional 320 GB hard drive, then make sure the total amount you have to invest will be about 3.2 million VND.

Meanwhile, if you buy a hard drive at 640 GB in the first place, the cost will be about 2.3 million. That will be the right decision that will bring much more economic efficiency!

Drive rotation speed

Instead of improving the drive's rotation mechanism, manufacturers focus on developing the drive's communication standard with the motherboard, which is why information about drive revolutions is now available. The disc still " stalled in place ". Users only see 5.400rpm information (rotation / minute), 7.200rpm or 10,000 rpm because the high-speed rotation of the drive also does not completely create a faster working speed.

However, not so that you ignore the speed of the drive rotation. Specifically, the 5,400rpm speed is not fast enough to work with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400/800 interfaces; instead, choose drives with speeds of 7,200rpm or 10,000rpm.

Pay attention to the connection type

Most current external hard drives are connected to devices via USB 2.0 ports, some of the latest models have USB 3.0 integration, along with some of them use FireWire (400 and 800) or eSATA connections. .

External drives using USB 2.0 ports are more popular because they can be compatible with many devices, including netbooks or ultrabooks, with at least one USB 2.0 port. Less common but faster than the FireWire standard, which provides data transfer rates of 400Mbps or 800Mbps.

With eSATA connection interface, with very high data transfer rate, 3Gbps (3,000 Mbps), much faster than USB 2.0. However, the eSATA connection interface does not provide power over the connecting cable, instead users will need to equip a power supply cable via USB or an external AC adapter.

The market now has drives with faster USB 3.0 connectivity standards than eSATA. USB 3.0 is backward compatible with USB 2.0. Some types of high-end external hard drives integrate all three USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and eSATA standards, but have a high price.

Whether the hard drive is shockproof or not

No one intended to ruin his device. However, no one can be sure that I will preserve the external hard drive in the best condition. Dropped stories are not rare with storage devices, including external hard drives. This can be considered as one of the reasons why many hard drives " go out the oldest ".

Therefore, please choose the type of device with shockproof rubber casing or devices with strong external strength and good strength if you do not want to have to buy a new hard drive or worse, lose all data important.

Besides the above factors, the problem of temperature and noise of the drive is also very interesting. However, the cooling for this device can solve some tapes in a simple way while the noise is not much difference between firms.