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1. #Best portable hard drive mac and pc compatible movie#
2. #Best portable hard drive mac and pc compatible windows#

Apple provides Thunderbolt ports on its most recent desktop and laptop computers, and the technology is beginning to show up on Windows machines, too.

#Best portable hard drive mac and pc compatible movie#

That’s speedy enough to transfer a full-length, high-definition movie in less than 30 seconds. Thunderbolt ports are twice as fast as USB 3.0 ports, achieving a raw data transfer rate of 10 gbps. The newer standard is backward-compatible, so your computer will be able to use a USB 3.0 drive even if the computer has only USB 2.0 ports. USB is the most common interface for Macs and PCs, and USB 3.0 delivers a faster data rate than USB 2.0 (5 gbps versus 480 mbps) and more electrical power to an attached device (900mA versus 500mA). The Buffalo MiniStation provides both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connections.ĭrive interface: Once you’ve decided on the speed and capacity you need, you need to consider how the drive will connect to your computer. Some high-end desktop drives spin their platters at 10,000 rpm. A drive spinning at 7200 rpm will deliver much better performance than a drive spinning at 5400 rpm.

Rotational speed: The rate at which a hard drive spins its platters has a direct effect on how fast it can read and write data. You won’t regret buying more storage capacity than you currently need, because you will surely need more later. Before you can choose the right drive, however, you have to identify your needs, wants, and budget.Įverything else being equal, a high-capacity drive will deliver a better price-to-performance ratio than a low-capacity model: For instance, a 500GB drive priced at $100 costs around 20 cents per gigabyte, while a 2TB drive priced at $180 costs just 9 cents per gigabyte. Pay for that storage capacity once, and you’ll own it forever-and you can take it with you wherever you go. For less than $200, you can get a 2TB drive that supplies four times the capacity of a Dropbox account. If you need just storage, as opposed to a service for file syncing or collaborating via the cloud, buying a portable hard drive is far more economical. One solution might be to rent storage space in the cloud, but buying a hard-drive’s worth of capacity is prohibitively expensive: 500GB of storage on Dropbox, for example, will set you back $499 per year.

And if your primary computer is a laptop or an all-in-one desktop, you won’t be able to solve the problem by opening the case and tossing in a supplemental drive. You can never have too much digital storage, and the day will come-sooner than you think-when you won’t be able to squeeze a single new file onto your computer’s hard drive.