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Hard drive brands

The most well-known hard drive brands include Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba and Hitachi, while others such as Samsung, SanDisk and G-Tech also offer sleek and powerful external storage or solid state drives.

Storage capacity

Smaller hard drives have less than 1 TB of storage, not much more than you get in some laptops. These are smaller and more expensive but offer faster boot up for files and programs, ideal for use inside a slim and powerful ultrabook or notebook.

If you are a video editor or a photographer you may want several terabytes of storage. Fortunately, hard drive storage is not that expensive to add, and a 4 TB hard drive will set you back less than £200 from some brands.

Connectivity

Until recently, most hard drives connected with USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 connections, but now many are moving over to USB-C, which offers 10 Gps of transfer speed, equivalent to twice the speed on offer from USB 3.0. Other forms of connection include wireless transfer to the hard drive.

Reliability

Although hard drives tend to be pretty reliable there are few comprehensive reviews of how reliable drives are over a long time under strain, and nobody wants to loose years of cherished photos or videos.