It’s a familiar problem for many computer users: the hard drive is full. Gigabyte after gigabyte of music, images and videos add up.
The solution, however, is clear: an external hard drive, even if it’s only for data backups. After all, nobody wants to be the one who loses his entire music collection or vacation photos in one fell swoop.
A visit to the electronics store can be confusing, though, with dozens of devices on the shelves. How can you choose the right one?
First, a rule of thumb: the bigger the hard drive capacity, the cheaper each unit of storage space. A recent study by Germany’s Computer Bild magazine found that for a 500 gigabyte hard drive, each gigabyte costs 16 cents; for a 1,500 or 2,000 gigabyte hard drive, that same gigabyte costs only 8 cents.
Normal users will have a hard time filling up hard drives with a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of memory. After all, a terabyte can hold around 250,000 photos, 400,000 songs or 385 hours of standard video, the German consumer testing organization Stiftung Warentest notes.
The most popular types of drive at the moment are 2.5-inch hard drives with 500 gigabytes of storage capacity and 3.5-inch drives with 1,000 gigabytes. Choosing between them is a matter of priorities.
“You should generally consider whether you want to have the freedom of mobility or whether you want cheap storage,” says Michael Schmidt, the technology editor at Computer Bild.
The 2.5-inch drives are significantly smaller and more robust, making them better suited for transport than their bigger 3.5-inch brothers.
“The large hard drives are better suited for large volumes of data, but should remain protected at home,” says Falk Murko from Stiftung Warentest.
The test magazine recently found that most of the smaller drives survived a drop test, while the 3.5-inch drives didn’t.
An additional mobility benefit…