They tend to be bigger in size and don’t have as much protection against drops. Some external hard drives are meant to stay relatively stationary. The best external hard drives should be able to withstand an occasional drop or two. They’re made to easily slip in and out of a laptop case or bookbag, taking up very little space. They’re lighter, thinner, and will likely have extra protection for the casing. Portable hard drives are designed for travel. This is also how much space you’d need for about 120 HD videos.Ĭommon storage sizes for external HDDs include: Typically, 1TB is enough for 250,000 MP3s or 200,000 digital photos. In terms of storage space, 1,024GB is equal to 1TB (terabyte). There are obvious benefits to getting power directly from your computer, but hard drives that are larger and more powerful may need an independent power source to optimize efficiency.

Your HDD will need to power itself by either an AC power cord or through its data cable that plugs into your computer. External HDDs that are not specific to Macs may also work, but you’ll need to reformat them first, which could take some time.Įven though Mac computers are capable of reading hard drives that are formatted for Windows, if you intend on using your external HDD as a bootable disk or want to use it to backup files with your Mac’s Time Machine, you must format it to be entirely Mac compatible. This is because when you initially connect an external HDD made for Mac (to a Mac computer), you won’t be required to format it before you begin transferring files. Key considerations Formattingįor Mac users, buying an external HDD already formatted for your system makes getting started much easier. There are varying levels of storage capacity in an external hard drive, and the overall size of the HDD depends on the model. Others will need to be plugged into the wall. Some external hard drives get power directly from the computer connection. Flash drives are external drives, but they aren’t as fast, and they don’t usually store as much space as their larger external hard drive relatives. flash drivesĮxternal hard drives are basically hard drives (HDD) or solid state drives (SSD) that are wrapped in their own protective casing and connect to your computer from the outside as opposed to the inside. There are hard drives that may hold volumes like 3TB, 6TB, and 10TB, but they are much less common than the standard hard drives that hold: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, and 18TB.

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