The newest and fastest external hard drive at the moment is the Western Digital My Book Essential 3 TB USB 3.0

Click here for the best price on WD MBE 3 TB USB 3.0 Hard drive

If you are looking for the fastest external hard drive, you basically have one option – you will have to go with SSD. The data transfer technologies have evolved to the point where it is the hard drive that is the limiting factor. On the other hand SSD is still a very new technology that doesn’t apply well for massive data storage. It is mostly used as the start up disk on computers thanks to it’s fast access to frequently needed files. This is why we still recommend you get a hard drive disk for your external storage needs.

How about USB for fast data transfer?

We live the age of high technology, and there are technologies already developed which will allow almost instant data transfer. In the past we talked about USB, which was quickly followed by USB 2.0 and now there is even USB 3.0 which can do ten times faster data transfer rates than is predecessor. That means that the fastest theoretical transfer rate is 5 GB/s, which is quite impressive, but still not at all the maximum. The reason for that faster transfer is the full duplex transfer where it uses two of five lanes for sending data, and two to receive. If you do the math, it means that it can simultaneously send and receive at maximum speed, making it very useful for devices like external hard drives which are used interactively. You might be listening to music or watching a movie sourcing in the external disk, and at the same time you could be transferring photos to the drive. Unlike previous versions, where you would easily notice the device hitting a wall when trying to transfer data in both ways.

Even though USB 3.0 external hard drives have the theoretical limit of 4.8 Gbits/s, the practical maximum that they can reach is somewhere around 3.2 Gbits. This is observed with this ultra portable external hard drive with USB 3.0 by Western Digital which hits the speed limit at around 3 Gbits/s.

They have also increased the power that is transferred through the USB connector, and today the USB 3.0 runs at 150mA unit load, and each device can use up to 6 unit loads for a total of whopping 900mA. What does this mean? Basically it means that your external hard drive will have more power to draw from. There might be technical innovations coming that use this additional power and you could possibly even find USB Raid systems where the seek time can be improved, or mirrored RAID systems where you will have some extra security against hard drive failures – yes unfortunately external hard drives do break as well. Right now, it is used more for recharging devices, and it means that using an USB hub will still allow enough power for each of the devices.

One of the most important things is that you can use 3.0 devices with 2.0 computers – it is backwards compatible. If you don’t have 3.0 connections on your computer, but you are planning on getting one that has, you don’t have to buy an older technology fast external hard drive to transfer the data from your old machine to the new one. But unfortunately not all hard drives will not enjoy all the benefits of USB 3.0 because of other limitations.

How about eSata or “External Sata”?

It’s touted as the fastest data connector but in reality it was out powered by USB 3.0. It can go for data transfer rates of up to three times faster than Firewire 400 and USB 2.0, but like said before it is still slower than newer technology.

One of the most important things when it comes to using eSata in the fastest external hard drives is the fact that it doesn’t have power going through it. You will need a separate power cable, or a power adapter for your hard drives. That is a problem for most who are looking for a very portable hard drive, but not so for others who are merely looking for something that stays on their desk at home. Even so, it is still not the fastest around and it is quite inconvenient at the same time. Hard drives will always suffer from limitations of physically storing the information, and that is why SSD (or solid state drives) hard drives are significantly faster than regular disks.

What is the fastest external hard drive?

Without further confusion it is time to make it clear at what we are looking for when we are trying to find a fast external hard drive. Basically all the external disks these days run at the same RPM and all the fastest ones are powered by USB 3.0 that is the current fastest transfer method – the drives are the limiting factor, not the connection. At the same time you should realize that it is not only the external disk that is the limiting factor here, but also the one you have inside your computer.

The current fastest external hard drive is the Western Digital My Book Essential 3 TB USB 3.0, which is the overall fastest drive that we have ever tested. A close second was the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk v 2.0 3 TB USB 3.0 which was actually slightly faster in reading large files than the WD drive, but slower at other tasks. Both of these drives are the fastest ones that you can find for storing and accessing large files such as images and movies. If you need fast speed when using small files there are other drives that might over perform these two.

There are many things that you have to take in to account when purchasing an external hard drive. We like to make it a bit simpler here, and instead of going through the technical specifications of each drive in detail, we like to tell you how it is. First of all, this is by far the most portable drive that we have found. If you are looking for something that you want to take with you on a regular basis because you need to move data between two or more computers, this is most likely what you are looking for. It doesn’t really get more ultra portable than this!

When it comes to usability, and ease of use, it is top of the line. The reasonable 1TB size is more than enough for a drive of this size. We were surprised at how small it really was – the pictures don’t do justice! In the photo above you can see the drive fitting easily in your hand, and you don’t really realie that before you give it a try. Thanks to the small size, this is a perfect ultra portable external hard drive for a laptop – you can easily fit it in your laptop case. Even if you don’t have a large case with lots of pockets, the thin 0.7 inch design allows you to strap it in the same pocket as your laptop.

Many people often are concerned whether an external hard drive will work with their operating system. This one works with Windows and Mac OS X according to the manufacturer, and according to the testing we have done, this is true. Also if you have any experience with external disks, you will easily get it working with your Linux distribution (with Ubuntu this is very easy). Most of the time all the portable and external disks work with the majority of operating systems, it is that the manufacturer or distributor does not guarantee this, and that you will usually have to format the drive to match the file system that is supported by your operating system. Unix distributions are generally very flexible with this and Windows often is very limited when it comes to supporting anything else than FAT32 or NTFS.

Some of the interesting features that we found from this product was the hardware encryption which provide you even further security for your files. You can feel free to transfer sensitive material using this drive thanks to the enhanced safety. Thanks to the extremely small size you can keep it with you at all times and when you need to transfer data, just plug it to the computer where you need to get the files from. Basically it can be used as a flash drive with a lot of capacity. The dual USB 3.0 and 2.0 enables you to transfer files extra fast – this means you are able to transfer files between your computer and your hard drive as fast as 5 gB/s which is a whopping ten fold increase when it comes to just a single channel USB 2.0, just not quite yet. It will take some time before this technology will be completely supported.

Size – very small!

If you are looking for a very small and portable hard drive, you are looking at the product for you. You don’t have to wear baggy jeans to be able to fit this in your pocket and make sure that it goes everywhere with you! Perhaps you are going to a party and you want to take your music collection with you as no-one else seems to have all those great songs as you have. Just use this Ultra Portable Western Digital My Passport to carry the files with you. It comes in a 750gB and 1TB size which doesn’t affect the physical size of the product.

Thanks to the glossy cool finish that it has, it doesn’t really look like you are carrying a hard drive with you. If you are old school, you most likely remember the sizes of hard drives just a few decades ago – it can be hard to understand that this one packs 100 times more data and is about a fifth of the size.

Speed?

USB 3.0. 10 times faster than USB 2.0. Nuff said? We did some testing. Depending on the location of the data (inner disc or outer region) the speeds will vary from 45MB/s to 85MB/s which is quite a normal difference, but since the whole drive is small, the disk has a smaller diameter so there isn’t as large difference between the inner and outer regions as there could be. When tranferring files, writing and reading, we found that it is about three times faster when using USB 3.0 when compared to USB 2.0.

Software

This ultra portable hard drive by Western Digital comes with software which enables two things. The hardware encryption which is especially important if you want to encrypt your files. If you are transferring sensitive business information or if you don’t want your photos to get in to the wrong hands, it is what you need.

The software also enables automatic backups for your computer – this is a very useful feature. Most of the time you think that your computer is just fine until the internal hard drive crashes. You lose all your data! Don’t let this happen. It’s easy to avoid the additional hassle by taking daily automatic backups of your files and your work.

Conclusion

This is by far the best small sized external hard drive we have ever tested or come accross. Why is this? Two things. It is physically the smallest one we could find which wasn’t SSD. Also it works the best. It is fastest with smallest seek times and very fast transfer with USB 3.0.

Click Here To Buy WD My Passport 1TB

Another thing that we face every day when it comes to buying anything is to find the best prices for it. Most of the time when you go to a store and look at the products, you realize that this isn’t the price that was listed online. Many online stores don’t have to pay high rents at good locations since their storage building can be located anywhere – they save a lot of money in expenses. Many of them don’t pay top dollars for TV ads as they can do their advertising online with a fraction of the cost, so they can give you better prices and a better service. If you are looking for the best price on portable external hard drives, we recommend you browse through our website, as we have done everything possible to find the cheapest prices for the highest quality products. This should be

Do you feel like you are always deleting files from your current hard drive as it is filling up? Is your computers slowing down? These are all problems that can be solved with an external hard drive as they will allow to split both the load and the files so that you will have a faster computer with more space for your valuable files.

Are you taking backups?

If you ever suffered a hard drive crash, you know the amount of work that is required to get it fixed. Almost every time you will lose all your files, and if you are working on your computer you will lose valuable data. The problem is that some work can’t be re-done, and even if you try the results will not be the same as you won’t have the same motivation to do it as you did before.

Take photographers for example – they need tons of disc space as they work with very high resolution images. Some of them do a lot of photo editing, and they are artists at what they do. Once they are done, it is not likely that they can repeat the process identically. What if their hard drive crashes? They all have high speed external hard drives that back up their work frequently – even  more than once a day. That way, if the internal drive breaks down, they will have a pretty new backup of their work.

If you are not worried about losing work or you are considering a portable external hard drive for your home computer, you might be pleased about the fact that you can get automatic backups of your computer, and in case something goes wrong, you can just revert your operating system from the backups. This means that you won’t have to re-install every program you had installed, and you won’t have to set up everything like they were before – it will be done automatically from your backups.

How about your family photos? Many of us use external hard drives for photos that we take of our families. We take pictures during important times in our lives, and we look back to them from time to time to remember those good days. Your children growing up, the vacation on which you proposed to your wife, everything important was on that hard drive! Good thing you had a backup on a portable hard drive.

How can an external hard drive speed up my computer?

Many of us have large amounts of data on our hard drives that is constantly accessed. You might say that you don’t, but at the same time you have a huge mp3 music collection which you have playing every time you are at your computer. This causes your hard drive to access the music in between doing everything else you are doing. So basically playing music can be slowing your computer down, but you should not sacrifice on the music. With a portable external hard drive that you have your music on, you can reduce the load on your internal drive, and speed up your computer. The current USB 2.0 and 3.0 technologies are fast enough for this, and you can even find drives that support firewire which is a faster technology on it’s own – we will discuss these technologies in another post.

Extend your storage space with external hard drives

Today you can find portable external hard drives from 500mb, 750mb, 1TB up to 2TB and even more. If you are storing a photo collection with high res photos (like most cameras today) you will need a lot of space and a quick connection – a firewire or an ethernet. Most people don’t realize that the oldest one of the connectors – the ethernet – still is the fastest. There are all kinds of fancy connections available, but if you choose to get an ethernet drive, you will realize that they are a lot faster than anything else.

Apple has a huge market share when it comes to selling personal computers, and that is why there is a demand for specific accessories that both work exceptionally well with OS X computers (Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion for example), but also match the appearance of the computer. That is why portable external hard drives for mac have such a high demand, and we intend to bring you some of the best drives that work well with your mac.

Companies like Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, LaCie, iOmega and Buffalo are making just some of the disks we are going to go through here. It doesn’t matter if you mainly use your computer for games, or if you have important files to back up or store on an external disk to just give your main drive more free space to work more efficiently, you will find the disk that fills your needs for attached storage from our website.

Important things that we will be going through are the rotational speed, which means that speed at which the disc rotates inside the drive. This will contribute to the loading times and the access speed as the faster the disc moves, the quicker the data can be accessed. Usually these drives work at a few standard speeds and if you are looking for high speed disks, you will also find that they are often more expensive. Unless you are connecting with ethernet, most drives will be just fine when it comes to rotational speed as the transfer rate of the connector will be the limiting factor in most cases.

The drives usually work with 5400 rpm, and the connection types can range from USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FIrewire 400 1394a, Firewire 800 (1394b-2002) to eSata and Ethernet. The technologies are listed here from slowest to fastest when it comes to transfer rates.  Of course you will have to look at other specifications like the writer heads, rotational speed but these days as we also have SSD Drives you have even more to choose from.

SSD drives are Solid State Drives, which means that they don’t have moving parts. There isn’t a platter that rotates at any speed and there isn’t a writing head. They work like the memory cards that you have in your camera, and because of this they are a lot faster when it comes to accessing the data. This is the top of the line technology, and if you are looking for a fast solution, you might want to look at having something like this set up in your computer system.