How do you determine which external harddrive to buy?

Ah, that is a good question. Let me explain.

Firstly, there are two different kinds of hard drives these days. The first, is the old standard which uses platter heads and a needle to write information on. The second kind is known as SSD or Solid State Drive, which uses flash memory in a drive that stays in the same state. The difference between the two is that SSD’s run quieter, and generate less heat with superior write speeds. The downfall though is that it’s a bit expensive.

The first thing you need to decide is the capacity you want on the drive, and I see you’re wanting anyhwhere from 1-2TB of storage. These drives usually are in the $59-120 range in Canadian dollars (since you live in Canada).

What you should also look for in the hard drive is its transfer speed or RPM (Revolution per minute) which means how many times it can make one full circle on the head in one minute. Right now, as technology advances, the RPM speeds range from 5400RPM - 7200RPM. While the RPM makes a difference, it is usually in the line of 10-20% difference in speed or about 3-8 seconds of difference between each other.

In addition to the drive, look for the size of its cache, or the space that is given to store information to access the different heads faster. You’ve most likely heard of this in RAM, which also caches data so that you can access the data quicker upon request. Most cache ranges from 8MB - 64MB, and I recommend getting the one with the most cache so you can access data faster.

The next thing you want to look for is the size of the drive. Most drives come in the 3.5” size that you can place inside a desktop computer as the drive bays are 3.5” in width. Laptop drives come in the 2.5” size to make it portable, but usually have limited RPM speeds of only 5400RPM.

The last thing you want to look for is the connection type. Most hard drives utilize the SATA 3.0Gb/s or SATA 6.0Gb/s technology. This means that write speeds are faster because the speed at which the information is transferred is double that of the old IDE standard which is limited to 450Mb/s to 600Mb/s. Generally IDE or EIDE drives are cheaper, but now that SATA and SATA II drives are popular, they are a lot cheaper than IDE drives.

There are many brands, but the ones who are trustworthy and reliable tend to be: ASUS, Western Digital, SAMSUNG, HITACHI, FUJISTSU, and SEAGATE.

Here is a list of some drives online that have good prices (in Canadian)

http://funadvice.com/r/bkrjvo3u027 - Western Digital 1TB 3.5” drive with USB 2.0 connection - $6*9.99

http://funadvice.com/r/bkrjvo3uns6 - Western Digital 1.5TB 3.5” drive with USB 2.0 connection - $79.99

http://funadvice.com/r/bkrjvo3vlj1 - Samsung 1TB 3.5” drive with USB 2.0 connection - $68.97

http://funadvice.com/r/15956c0crh4 - HITACHI 1TB 3.5” drive with removable 4GB flash drive 3.5” drive with USB 2.0 connection - $6*9.97