2.What you need to know before you buy USB ForumExternal Hard Disk The first iPods , released in 2001 , functioned only as. It interprets what is on the external hard drive so that your Mac or PC can read and write to the drive. This software acts like a translator. Or one for your Windows PC. Use a Software Solution You get a piece of software that sits on your Mac. Options For Having An External Hard Drive For Mac And PC Without Formatting.
External Drive And Pc Portable Drive InIDGThe 1TB drive may seem like the best deal, but in terms of price per gigabyte, the 4TB and 5TB drives are far better deals. Keep in mind, this is one drive on one day (May 13, 2021), and just one vendor, Amazon, but it illustrates the point. In fact, dollar for dollar, cheaper low-capacity drives are most often the worst deal.For example, we compared prices of the WD My Passport portable drive in its 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 5TB capacities. However, while you might think that the lowest-cost drive provides the most value, it often doesn’t.See the discussion on backup below. Remember, if you’re storing important data, you need a backup—online, or if the data is copious, on a second drive. Save your pennies and get one, or two of the larger drives. Don’t worry about Gen 2, 10Gbps, or Thunderbolt with single hard drive enclosures.Where Superspeed 10Gbps/20Gbps, USB4, or Thunderbolt will definitely help is with the aforementioned RAID setups, or more likely—an SSD. For the sake of brevity (and sanity), we generally shorten those names to USB 10Gbps, or 10Gbps USB, for instance.No hard drive, unless combined in RAID with others, can outstrip the 5Gbps (roughly 500MBps real world after overhead) throughput of USB 3.1 Gen 1. In an attempt to simplify things, the USB Forum has recently changed the nomenclature to indicate throughput speed–Superspeed USB 5Gbps, Superspeed USB 10Gbps, and Superspeed USB 20Gbps–because performance is a priority for most uses. Beyond that simple statement, the story gets confusing—largely because of the plethora of variations: USB 3.0, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps, which is basically USB 3.0), USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps), and USB 3.1 Gen 2×2 (20Gbps), and now USB 3.2 and USB4. IDG/Gordon Mah UngThe top drive uses the older, slower Mini-USB interface. A 1TB Samsung T5 on USB is only $125.To summarize: USB 5Gbps/10Gbps is cheaper and fast enough for most users and applications. There aren’t a lot of 2×2 ports out there, but these drives will also work with USB4 at the same 20Gbps pace.Thunderbolt has always come at a premium. Our recommended portable, the Samsung Portable SSD X5, is also $200 for 500GB of capacity. A SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD that is our runner-up for portable storage can be had for $90 in a 500GB capacity.Now it’s Superspeed USB 20Gbps (Gen 2×2) that’s the high-priced blend, with the Seagate Firecuda Gaming SSD costing $200 for the same 500GB of storage. Here’s what you need to care about:USB 3 Micro-B Superspeed. PortsExternal drives come with a variety of ports, though they’re gradually consolidating on the Type-C connector. The bottom drive features USB-C or USB Type C. The Orange drive features both a SuperSpeed Micro B and Thunderbolt 2 (mini DisplayPort connector). Type B ports are becoming rare, though you might find one on enclosures supporting 5.25-inch hard drives or optical drives. It’ll do 5Gbps and is fine for hard drives and SATA (internally) SSDs.USB 3 Type-B is the larger, blocky version of USB 3.0 Micro B. It’s actually the same Micro USB port used on your phone, but beefed up with more data lines to hit USB 3.0 speeds. The technology currently supports up to 40Gbps (80Gbps has been mentioned), and it’s backward-compatible all the way to USB 1.1 via adapters.Type-C is a spec for a cable and connector, not for the USB protocol itself. It’s also the connector used for Thunderbolt 3 and 4. It’s being used increasingly on phones, tablets, PCs, and yes, external drives. If you see a USB logo or speed, e.g., 10Gbps, it’s likely only USB drives will function. The mere fact that it’s also used for Thunderbolt 3/4 should clue you in.The bottom line is, if you see the Lightning icon next to a Type-C port, you can attach Thunderbolt 3/4 and USB (Thunderbolt supports USB) drives. It’s used by USB, but otherwise tells you nothing about the level or iteration of USB involved. It does not transfer power, however, so you can’t use it on its own with bus-powered external drives. There’s no need to invest in a Thunderbolt 2 drive unless it’s for legacy support issues.Note that Apple makes a bi-directional Thunderbolt 1/2 to 3 adapter if you need to connect the one to the other. Using the mini-DisplayPort connector, it only really gained popularity on Macs, and even Apple put it out to pasture in 2017. The reason we mention it is that, any drive with a Type-C port should come with a Type-C to Type-A cable or adapter.Thunderbolt 2 is at this point, a dead port. MacBooks have no logo, but their Type-C ports are Thunderbolt.USB Type-A You won’t find this port on any drive, but you will on PCs and laptops. Download hulu on macAs with Thunderbolt 2, the only reason to invest in an eSATA drive is for use with older computers. USB 3.0 put the last nail in its coffin. Created for attaching external storage to your computer’s SATA bus, eSATA was a cheap way in its day to get beyond the 60MBps performance of USB 2.0. However, for vast photo, audio, and/or video collections,external drives in pairs (or more), are a faster, more practical solution.Create complete backups alternately to the two drives every few months. Preferably, the two backups are kept in separate locations, one being offsiteKeeping a copy online is great for smaller amounts of data and certainly meets the offsite criteria. It states that you should always maintain three copies of your irreplaceable data: the original data, a backup, and a backup of the backup. How we testedWe use our standard storage test bed to evaluate the performance of every external drive we review. Currently a Gigabyte Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt card and x2 Nvidia 710 GPU card are employed. Older Asus Thunderbolt EX 3 and ATI graphics cards is shown. IDG/Gordon Mah UngOur storage testbed is a Core i7-5820K with 64GB of RAM on an Asus X99 Deluxe board. Emulator iphone games on macAn Asus USB 3.1/10Gbps (Asmedia 1142 controller) card was employed for some of the older drives on the chart.
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