Ever since our lives became digitized with every photo, video, and file we save onto our computer over many years, it has reached a point where we need to store all of this information from our lives and work so that it doesn’t get lost.
Imagine having spent years collecting 1000’s of photos and files for work and gaming, only to have your computer hacked and all those files deleted, or the hard drive dies after several years of use and everything on it is unrecoverable.
These NIGHTMARE situations can be easily avoidable with a hard drive!
A hard drive lets you store all your data from the computer on it, and they come in various sizes from 500GBs to 10TBs, so you will never run out of storage space. Although they are used for storage purposes, they do have other benefits for gamers and editors.
Gaming
Whether you’re a PC gamer, or console gamer, investing in an external hard drive will benefit you. Hardcore gamers will know too well the heartache of deleting a game to free up space before another one can be installed.
An external hard drive will not only solve this issue with storage space, but it will also help the computer’s performance and speed while gaming due to freeing up space.
For PC gamers, make sure to purchase one with high-speed connectors like thunderbolt or USB-C, as some hard drives have Type-A connectors that provide slow data transfer, resulting in severe lag when gaming.
For console gamers on Xbox and PlayStation, you can purchase external hard drives with USB 3.0, which is super-fast for gaming.
Editing
A hard drive is also an essential part of editing like audio editing, photo & video editing, digital illustrations, and 3D rendering require massive amounts of data processing, which the computer alone, even with CPU and GPU, cannot handle.
While performing some of these tasks like digital editing, especially when the internal hard drive is at full capacity, can cause it to crash, leading to loss of unsaved data. With an external hard drive, you can automatically save your data using RAID processing, as it has the option to use multiple external hard drives connected as one to transfer and save large amounts of data.
Backups
It’s always advisable to make backups when possible just in case disaster strikes, and you lose everything from viruses or computer damage. Backing up your computer data to an external hard drive is a simple way of creating secondary copies while making it easier to transfer this data to other computers.
Most hard drives need the data to be manually transferred, while some of the newer models have an automatic backup option to make life easier.
Specifications
As technology grows year by year, so does the price tag, speed, and size, leading to an enormous selection available to select. Though they all do the same job, each hard drive has a different storage capacity, quality, and transferring speed, for specific needs.
Sizes – They start at 250GB, which is around 100 movies or a whole lifetime of pictures, and go up to 4 or 5GB, which is an astronomical amount for computer data.
Prices – You can pick up a good quality hard drive for around £40 from 250GB to 600GB, and for higher capacity storage will cost over £100, depending on where you shop.
Transfer speed – Unlike 15 years ago when the transfer speed was in Mps, the majority of the new ones transfer at a rate of 3Gbps and up to 12, which is seriously fast!