subject: The Best External Hard Drive Deals Online Today [print this page] The Best External Hard Drive Deals Online Today
There are all sorts of ways you can store your files now, whether you want to back up your data, keep your photos and videos separate from the rest of your data or generally clear some space on your computer.
One of the easiest, simplest and cheapest ways of doing this is to get a USB desktop hard disk a large
capacity disk that will soak up your files and offers a good level of performance. For the purposes of this review we chose 1TB disks 1,000GB of storage. Larger disks are available, but we thought the 1TB average price point of around 100 hit a sweet-spot between capacity and price.
IOMEGA EGO DESKTOP
From the outside, this disk from Iomega looks nothing out of the ordinary. Its jet-black case is
surrounded by a silver ribbon, while the USB connection will be familiar to anyone who has plugged in a
printer. It also has a power switch on the back, so that once you've shut down your computer, you can be sure that your hard disk isn't still whirring away, wasting electricity. However, this
unassuming case hides a power-house inside. PassMark's Advanced Disk test measured the average speed of this disk to be 2.96MB/s, which makes it far and away the fastest product in our test. If it's
performance you're looking for, you can stop searching now.
With a powerful disk tucked away behind its unassuming exterior, the Iomega eGo is worth considering for its speed alone.
WD MY BOOK ELITE
There aren't many hard disks that can tell you how full they are at a glance, but My Book Elite from
Western Digital does just that. It has a digital display that shows you both graphically and numerically how much space is left on it, which should help eliminate those 'disk full' surprises that always seem to
occur when you least want them to. The disk comes with a highly integrated software suite that
installs to your computer so it's even aware whether or not you've got the hard disk plugged in. You can also use it to manage a number of Western Digital disks at the same time. However, the main thrust of the software is to deal with back-up on the device. The software does this very well and offers plenty of configuration options, so you can choose what to back up, where to put it and when to schedule it to run automatically. It's also possible to use the software to encrypt and lock the drive, so that only those who know the password can gain access and see the data that's on it.
My Book Elite's performance was decidedly average in our tests, lounging around the lower end of the speed table with most of the other disks. This doesn't make it uncommonly slow but it doesn't challenge the speedier disks. There are much faster disks than this product, which barely nudged 2MB/s.
Average performance let the Western Digital disk down, keeping it at the lower end of our performance scale. However, considering the software package you get with the device and the handy external display that'll keep you informed of the disk's capacity, it's well featured for the price and offers fair value for money.
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