best external hard drives for mac 120 gb

#Best external hard drives for mac 120 gb Pc#

It’s very important to back them up in case your laptop fails, or is lost or stolen. How you decide to do this should influence your choice of laptop.įirst, you will have essential files such as essays and background research. When you go to university or college, you will need to look after a lot of files. Photograph: Caiaimage/Sam Edwards/Getty Images/Caiaimage (See Which NAS should I buy to store files?) Plan your storage

#Best external hard drives for mac 120 gb Pc#

The solution is to put them on a NAS, which will stream them to your TV, PC and other devices. If you have thousands of music files, thousands of photos, and hundreds of movies, they’re probably not going to fit on a laptop. Some people have home media servers or NAS (network-attached storage) file servers. The advantage is that you can access your online files from other devices including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

In fact, other developments have helped to compensate for the lower capacities of SSDs.įor example, many people now store more data in the cloud – using online services such as Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox – instead of on their laptops.

The bigger question is how much you really need. A 1TB hard drive stores eight times as much as a 128GB SSD, and four times as much as a 256GB SSD. A laptop might come with a 128GB or 256GB SSD instead of a 1TB or 2TB hard drive. Of course, SSDs mean that most people have to make do with much less storage space. If you can afford an SSD, it’s the way to go.

However, every time Flash memory prices fall, SSDs become cheaper and more people are willing to pay the price difference. That’s why the changeover has already taken more than two decades. SSD storage costs much more than HDD storage and the ratio used to be much higher. The drawback is, and always has been, the price. When a program fetches data from an SSD, it doesn’t have to wait: it’s almost instantly available. When a program needs data from the hard drive, it has to wait until the hard drive spins up, which causes a slight delay. In laptops, the hard drive is not kept spinning all the time, so as to save power and provide longer battery life. SSDs make actions such as loading and saving programs and files much snappier.