Take it all with you
PORTABLE HARD DRIVES ARE THE MOST POPULAR WAY TO GET MORE DIGITAL STORAGE AND THEIR COMPACT SIZE MEANS THEY’RE EASY TO TAKE WITH YOU. WE TEST 12.
DESPITE MANY OF us relying heavily on the cloud these days, if you’re one to keep a lot of videos, photos and music, a hard drive is an indispensable piece of kit. For professional photographers, that hard drive might be a My Passport Wireless Pro that’ll wirelessly sync with a camera to store photos as they’re taken. For cinematographers who want to work directly off the drive, a portable SSD is probably going to be the best bet. But for most, the affordability and large capacity of portable hard disk drives is hard to pass up.
Following the integration of USB Type-C into the latest high-end ultrabooks, the new cabling standard has finally started to trickle down into external hard drive ranges. USB 3.1 (Type-C) is theoretically capable of carrying twice the data of USB 3.0, but when the older standard is capable of transferring data at 5Gbps, the upgrade is purely for compatibility and perception, offering no real technical boosts to a portable hard drive. Yet, despite the lack of usefulness to this category, many of the pricier models have started including the Type-C connection in their devices. Seagate did manage to put the extra current carrying capacity of the USB Type-C connection to good use, creating the first 3.5-inch external
hard drive unit that doesn’t require its own power adapter, but in the portable drive space, it seems more of a status symbol still.
With a few new drives in the mix and the landscape changing alongside the decline in price of SSDs, TechLife takes another look at the best portable drives, for keeping your data safe when you’re out and about.
BUNDLED SOFTWARE COMPARED
First up, though, most external storage devices you’ll buy today come bundled with some kind of software, be it backup software, remote access, encryption or drive utilities. If you’re going to buy an external drive, it’s absolutely worth knowing what you’re going to get on the software front. It can make all the difference.
Typically, drive makers have a standard bundle that they provide with most, if not all, of their external products. Over the next two pages, we thought we’d go ahead and give you an overview of what those bundles are, broken down by vendor.