We do a lot of things on the cloud nowadays, saving and sending files through cloud storage services. Unfortunately, that isn’t 100% safe. You are more likely to pay more attention to what you have in your own hands. The thing with portable drives is that, you will always make it a priority, and not fall into complacency with work that involves an external hard drive. Saving data is all about safety and backing things up properly. The reason why portable drives still exist is because you can never be too safe when storing and saving data.
Type of connection
There’s really two types of hard drive connections right now. You’ve got the USB and the Thunderbolt. The latter is obviously used with Mac devices that have Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 ports. Naturally, you’ll want to lean towards a portable drive that has a Thunderbolt connection or cable. On the other hand, there’s the universally accepted USB connection. A USB-based drive can connect with any USB port on any device that allows a USB connection.
There should be no surprise that today’s laptops and desktops from Apple supports both USB and Thunderbolt. The ideal thing to do is to buy a drive that has the fastest USB connection. So now, you won’t have to worry about limiting yourself to a Thunderbolt only connection. It just makes life easier if you can swap one device for another without having to switch the necessary cables.
The reason why portable drives still exist is because you can never be too safe when storing and saving data.
Back to the future
The second most important thing to check off is thinking about how future-proof your portable device will be. Ultimately, it depends on what type of device you are using, but you need to think about how long you’ll be using the given device. Regardless, you’ll want to invest in something that is ready for future devices like the USB-C port. You will eventually see new devices that only support a smaller and faster USB-C port, which means it’ll be wiser to buy a portable hard drive that can convert into a USB-C connection.
Not to worry, even Mac users will eventually shift to the same port type and cable as the USB-C. Thunderbolt 3 will be the new and improved connection type with new Apple devices. And if your current device doesn’t have the latest port or connection, there are plenty of cables out there that will connect your current device to future portable drives and devices.
Ready, set, go
Plenty of space is important but so is speed. Portable hard drives that have a solid-state drive (or SSD) are incredibly fast. In fact, some of your new laptops have SSDs housed in them. However, SSDs are not cheap, they’ll cost you a good chunk. The idea here is knowing what exactly you are using it for. If it’s just about saving movies and other media files, then really fast performances shouldn’t be a priority. Then again, if you are using it quite often for more than just watching movies, speed is a very important factor.
Whether it’s for work or other important documentation, you’ll want the fastest transfers an SSD can provide. The Thunderbolt drives are actually faster than the regular USB drives, although a USB 3.1 standard is close enough and will satisfy your need for speed.
Move over, you need space
This should be a no-brainer. The more space, the better. If space matters to you most, more than anything else, a solid hard drive-based portable drive is the ideal choice. A 4TB storage can go up to Tk10,000. If you want the same in SSD format, well, that will obviously cost you much more. The capacity in a portable drive will always will cater to your needs, you just need to know what you need it for and how much space you are willing to use.
Takeaway
The ultimate message here is that the checklist is quite simple, just don’t forget to tick each of the boxes off. The more popular and trusted brands of portable drives are from Western Digital (WD), Samsung and SanDisk. For overall performance, the WD My Passport Ultra is possibly your best bet. It’s small, very fast for a non-SSD, and it will only cost you around Tk8,000 for a 3TB model.
