PC 101: Choosing the Best Desktop Hard Drive

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You should consider several factors when evaluating suitable desktop hard drives. They include: size, price, and the reputation of the company making them. Cheap hard drives that die in the first few months do very little good for you so don’t always make price the deciding factor. These are a few of the best desktop hard drives you might want to consider in your search.

The LaCie Rugged All Terrain Portable External Hard Drive is, as you’ve figured out, a durable and tough hard drive that will work just about any place that you want to take it. The shell is scratch resistant and aluminum and the rubber bumper is shock resistant and is protected from accidents.

You should still be careful with it, though, especially when it’s actually transferring files. This hard drive is compatible with pretty much every computer because it was built to work with Firewire 800, Firewire 400 as well as USB 2.0. It doesn’t even have an external power cord, it just gets plugged into your computer. The LaCie Rugged external hard drive has 500 GB of storage space with is a nice size but it isn’t the most that is available.

The Seagate GoFlex Satellite is highly useful and it lets you stream digital content through your Wi-Fi network. Not only will it be compatible with Windows based PCs and Macs, you can use it to stream movies and data from your iPad. You can actually stream up to five hours of video on a single charge with this device. If you are an iPad user you aren’t going to have to worry about the possibility of running out of space since you have the ability to upload your files to the Seagate GoFlex Satellite. This is incredibly convenient if you’d like to travel with your iPad because you can take this wireless storage device with you too and you can be absolutely sure that you will have all of the files that you want.

One of the first things that you need to look at when you’re shopping for an external hard drive is what kind of connectivity it offers. They will generally offer you a choice between USB or Firewire, although some devices have both. Firewire is a lot faster but isn’t available on all pc computers but nearly every computer has USB connectivity. There is also an emerging connectivity format called Thunderbolt technology that is the fastest of them all but not that many devices actually use it yet. Another factor to consider is size, and today you can find external hard drives that have as much as 2 TB of space, which is a little less than 2000 GB.

These are just a few of your options when you want to have an external hard drive. You’ve heard it plenty of times by now–you have to back up your important data and a really high quality desktop hard drive is perhaps the best way to do this. You can store so much data on these devices and they can keep you from having to worry that you are losing something that is really important to you. Finding the very best desktop hard drive for what you need is really only a matter of picking a good brand and figuring out which features are the most important to you.