The cost of storage per gigabyte (or should we now say per terabyte) is always falling and is at an all time low. But at the same time the amount of data we generate is growing and this data needs to be backed up. In years gone by we could save our few documents to a floppy disk but now we have photos, music and films occupying gigabytes of space on our hard disks.
Fortunately for us all, getting and connecting an external hard drive has never been easier or cheaper. Windows, Apple and Linux all support external USB drives and I have compiled a list of 10 huge external hard drives to help you backup your data. All the drives below are available on Amazon’s UK web site.
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1) Starting with cheap and cheerful, the cheapest 1TB drive on Amazon is the Hitachi S1000U 1TB Turbo USB. It costs just £67.72 which is a lots of space for only a few pounds. There are no fancy features, it is just a 3.5 inch hard drive in a box! |
| 2) Next up for just a few pennies more is the Maxtor 1TB Basics Desktop USB 2.0. It costs £67.99 and the hard drives runs with a spindle speed of 7200 rpm (which means it has the potential to be faster as the data is read from the platter quicker). |  |
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3) For just a pound or so more you can get the Seagate Expansions 1TB External Desktop USB 2.0. It is only £68.86 and also comes with a 7200 rpm disk and a two year limited warranty. |
| 4) Leaving cheap behind and turning to style you can get the LACIE 301304EK Hard Disk External Hard Drive Designed by Neil Poulton. This 1TB drive costs £72.95. Neil Poulton is an award winning Scottish-born product designer who currently works out of Paris. If you want 1TB of storage and a little bit of style this drive is worth considering. |  |
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5) If you want faster data transfer rates then USB 2.0 is limited to 480Mbps but eSATA is the external standard for the Serial ATA specification. eSATA has much higher theoretical transfer speeds than USB. One drive with feature is the Envizage Black & Silver Aluminium External 1000GB 1TB Hard Drive With USB2.0 & E-Sata II. It only costs £77.02 but the great thing is that it also support USB, so you can’t lose! |
| 6) If you have a Mac rather than a PC you might want to try FireWire instead of USB or eSATA. The Western Digital My Book Home Edition 1TB supports USB 2.0, eSata and Firewire and only costs £95.88. |  |
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7) For £111.58 you can get a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1TB with Firewire 800 support. FireWire 800 is a newer faster version of the FireWire standard and comes built-in to some of the new Apple Macs. |
Hard drives 8 and 9 in my list are for truly huge hard drives… 1.5TB and 2TB.
| 8) The Seagate Expansions 1.5TB External Desktop USB 2.0 Hard Drive costs £94.97, supports USB 2 and has a 7200 RPM hard disk. It has built-in power management to ensure energy efficient operation and comes with a 2-year limited warranty. |  |
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9) For a true monster of a drive you can try the Western Digital My Book Home Edition 2TB USB 2.0 Firewire & eSata External Hard Drive. It costs just under £200 and packs 2TB of data using a single hard drive. By my calculations this drive can store over 83 days of continuous MP3 music. |
I have reserved the last slot for something different, the Drobo…
| 10) The Drobo – 4 Bay Storage Array can hold up to 4 hard disks (of mixed capacities), supports USB 2 and FireWire and can protect your data using RAID (a system where data is duplicated between the disks so that your data remains intact even if a hard drive fails). The Drobo costs just over £300 without any hard drives. |  |
Guest post by Data Backup Technology
5 thoughts on “10 Huge External Hard Drives to Backup Your Data”
I had a internal hard drive failure over the weekend, and am just glad that I’ve been backing up to an external for a while. Your #6 just might have saved my life!
I have 6 TB of space across 3 computers, need more! 3 Single TB drives (2 int, 1 ext) the rest are 500 & 320gb drives.
Great collection to take the back up..!! Now a days it became a mandatory thing to protect your data and its being very easy by keeping the data into the hard drive ..
Interesting and informative. But will you write about this one more. Thanks.
In the Data Scanning and Management industry storing data is an important part of the trade. Raid technology with power back up and Disaster recovery reduce fear of data loss.