You can also hot-swap drives, easily sliding an old one out and a new one in with no tools, without turning the LaCie unit off. With network-attached storage (NAS) like WD’s 8TB My Cloud Home, you can save your files on the hard drive and access or manage them from the My Cloud Home app anywhere you have an Internet connection. How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is second only to the type of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data.

In the case of these and single-platter-drive products, you're not meant to swap out the drive or drives inside. It must also be plugged into the wall with a power adapter, so it’s not the easiest to tote around to different places. Mainstream hard drives of 8TB capacity generally can’t fit into a very portable size, but the WD My Book is still a fairly compact unit that houses a 3.Backing up your data to an external storage device is smart, but in today’s always-connected world, why not also take advantage of the cloud? Slightly rounded edges and ripples give the My Passport drive both the look and the feel of a consumer gadget. We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives inside and requiring a dedicated power cable plugged into AC power to work.

In terms of performance, the My Book transfers files as fast as any comparable hard drives today through its single USB 3.The LaCie Rugged Raid Shuttle is an 8TH external and portable hard drive with everything you need to keep your data safe. Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them.

Setup is straightforward; simply plug in the included power supply and USB cable, and you are ready to go. But I'd like it to be of decent quality, if possible, and my budget is limited, so spending a ton more to put my own together in a case is a very poor option (and my luck with bring-your-own-drive external cases is terrible anyway). Almost every recent drive we have reviewed supports USB, and the same goes for laptops and desktops.as real users, posing a threat to a site’s security, so the site sometimes runs random security checks. With storage capacities reaching up to a whopping 20TB, these drives offer more space than many other options out there. Some in the storage industry refer to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply.