External hard disks - 15 rated and reviewed
Is your PC’s hard disk getting cramped? Invest in an external hard disk and never again worry about running out of room.
Think back to your first PC. Remember how big the hard disk was? A straw poll in the office revealed 6GB, 1GB and even 20MB drives were once considered capacious.
These days those figures won’t even accommodate the latest version of Windows –Vista requires 15GB of storage space – or the newest games or applications: Crysis swallows a whopping 12GB, while software from the likes of Adobe is almost as storage hungry.
Thankfully, hard disk technology has moved at an even quicker pace. It’s possible to get a terabyte of empty hard disk for just $219, while $170 will net you 500GB. Many of the desktop drives come with eSATA, which offers faster performance than either USB or FireWire.
Portable storage is cheaper than ever, too. Here, we’ve reviewed drives with capacities up to 500GB for $323 and 320GB for $150. Many also have software pre-installed to make backup, encryption and synchronisation simple.
USB 3, the third incarnation of the enormously popular interface, has recently been announced so we’ve examined the specifications of this potentially ground-breaking new interface to see what impact it will have on external storage.
We also have a look at how assembling your own external drive with an enclosure can save quite a bit of money.
How we test, plus the ratings explained:
We’ve tested 15 external hard disks this month but, aside from having hundreds of gigabytes of storage each, they’re all very different. Seven are desktop drives best suited to sitting beside your PC; the others are smaller, 2.5in drives that can be carried around in your pocket – even the heaviest, the Iomega eGo, weighs just 268g.
Because the drives on test are designed for different situations, we’ve separated them into two categories. The Plextor Portable Hard Disk may be our top-scoring portable drive, for instance, but it looks decidedly low on features when parked next to desktop drives with eSATA, FireWire and 7200rpm hard disks inside.
So bear in mind that, while each drive is awarded a score out of six for Performance, Features & Design and Value for Money, as well as an Overall score, these scores are comparable only with other drives of the same type.
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Performance
The various disks in this month’s Labs have different spindle speeds, buffers and physical characteristics but, in practice, what’s important is how quickly each one reads and writes files. Our performance score is therefore based on real-world exercises.
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Our USB tests use a small 50MB file, a larger 650MB file and a collection of 1000 files totalling 100MB to see how the drives perform in a variety of situations. We connect each drive via USB to a PC running Windows Vista and format it to NTFS. We use Windows Explorer to copy the three files from a RAM disk to the drive, timing the operation from start to finish. We then dismount the drive to prevent Windows’ file-caching service affecting the results, reconnect it and time the same operation in reverse.
This process is repeated five times for each drive. If the drive is equipped with eSATA or FireWire, we repeat the suite of tests using these interfaces as well. The mean average results for all of our tests are reproduced in the charts here.
The stars we award for performance reflect the best set of results available from each drive, so the highest marks in both categories go to those with eSATA support.
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This article appeared in the January, 2009 issue of PC Authority.
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