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The Best External Desktop Hard Drive. The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive is one of the fastest hard drives we tested, with a read speed of 1. MB/s. It’s less expensive per terabyte than most of the competition, and the 4 TB model is a better value than the 3 TB version (the only other capacity available). Seagate also includes handy backup software and 2. GB of free One. Drive cloud storage for two years. If you need a larger drive, check out our pick with more storage. If the Seagate is out of stock, Toshiba’s 5 TB Canvio for Desktop is a great second choice.

Though not as fast as our top pick in HD Tune tests—the Toshiba’s average read speed was 1. MB/s slower—it was faster than the rest of the competition in our multifile music and photo transfer tests. It has more storage space than the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop for roughly the same price per terabyte, but its software isn’t as straightforward or useful as the Seagate’s. We recommend the 5 TB Canvio over the 4 TB because it’s nearly $2 less expensive per terabyte, and at around $1. If you’re looking for the most storage you can get in a single drive, we recommend the 8 TB Western Digital My Book. The 8 TB My Book’s read speed was 8.

Marketplace® is your liaison between economics and life. Noted for timely, relevant and accessible coverage of business news across both audio and digital platforms. Many of the planetary controllers are blood feasting pedophiles, parasitic monsters literally and predatorily feeding off the 8 million children gone missing each. After 20 hours of new research and testing, we found the best external desktop hard drive for most people is Seagate’s 4 TB Backup Plus Desktop Drive.

MB/s slower than our top pick, and it was also slower in our Blu- ray file transfer tests. Despite that, its write speed was 7. MB/s faster than our top pick’s, and it was also consistently faster in our multifile music and photos tests. Watch New Birth Of A Nation (2016) Online here.

The 8 TB version is also faster and cheaper per terabyte than the other My Book models. We’ve spent hundreds of hours researching and testing hard drives over the past few years. Take a few minutes to set up a system that will back up your files automatically to an external hard drive and the cloud. Your computer’s internal drive will stop working someday, and backing up solely to an external drive isn’t a bulletproof strategy to protect yourself from data loss. You should consider replacing your backup drives between the third and sixth year of use.

If your drive dies and you have a cloud backup, you won’t lose data, but restoring from the cloud will take a very long time (and probably blow through your monthly data cap). If you don’t, well, say bye to your stuff. According to statistics from cloud backup service Backblaze, hard drives are most likely to fail either within the first 1.

About five percent of drives fail in the first 1. Free Download Allegiant (2016) Movie. At three years of service, the failure rate jumps to almost 1.

At four years, the failure rate is 2. Based on five years of data, Backblaze estimated that more than half of hard drives will last six years. If you frequently move between different locations, you should consider a portable external drive rather than a desktop drive. But if you spend most of your time working from the same desk, a desktop external drive is the better choice.

They’re generally cheaper per terabyte than smaller portable models, and the larger platters and required AC power supplies translate into faster speeds and more capacity. What makes a good desktop hard drive. The most important features for a desktop hard drive are reliability, speed, capacity, and price per terabyte, followed by warranty support, good customer service, and—as a bonus—useful software. Ideally, an external hard drive is something you don’t notice much. It should sit on your desk, quietly spinning away, storing and backing up your data without a lot of setup or ongoing maintenance. Reliability is the most important factor for any storage medium, but solid information on drive reliability can be hard to come by. What we do know is this: All hard drives die.

Every brand has drives that will last for years, and every brand has faulty units that will fail within a couple of months. Sure, Seagate’s drives tend to be reliable—Backblaze uses 4 TB Seagate drives as their “workhouse drives” in its data centers, and it reported that it’s pleased with their 2. We considered only those drives with USB 3.

Anything faster isn’t necessary for hard drives, because they’re limited by disk speed, not the USB interface. As the new USB 3.

Gen 2 standard becomes more common and the prices of solid- state drives drop,2 we may find a desktop external solid- state drive worth recommending. For now, USB 3. 0 is fine.

Only three companies still make hard drives: WD (which also makes HGST drives), Seagate, and Toshiba. All of them make good products nowadays, and you have little reason to worry about their product lines.

Every other company that sells external hard drives uses drives from one of these manufacturers. How we picked and tested. Left to right: 2. Seagate Backup Plus, Western Digital My Book, 2.

Seagate Backup Plus, and Toshiba Canvio for Desktop. Of 1. 83 respondents, 5. About a third of respondents said they needed 2 TB or 3 TB drives, and another third wanted 4 TB or 5 TB models. So we tested mostly 4 TB and 5 TB models, which met most respondents’ price requirements, and still left plenty of additional capacity for future storage needs.

The 8 TB capacity models usually have better prices per terabyte, but they’re costly and have more storage than most people need. After narrowing our list of finalists by price and capacity, we tested seven desktop hard drives. For each one, we ran HD Tune Pro, a benchmarking program that tests transfer speeds, access time, burst rate, and CPU usage across the entire disk. You can read a more in- depth explanation of the program at the HD Tune website. We also timed a series of file transfers—a 7. GB folder of photos, a 1. GB music collection, and a 4.

GB rip of a Blu- ray movie—from start to finish, running each transfer three times and determining the average to rule out performance hiccups. To spot any widespread reliability issues, we read through Amazon reviews for each of the drives we tested, and counted the number of drive failures reported by users. This method has shortcomings. For one, people are more likely to post a review when they have a problem. Also, because of the limited information available in some reviews, it can be hard to differentiate between hardware failures and software issues or user errors that could cause problems with a drive. And many of the drives we tested for this update are new, so there weren’t many Amazon reviews. But this approach is the best we have for now.

We also looked at Backblaze’s hard drive reliability ratings from the first half of 2. Backup servers are a very different environment than a box on your desk—bare drives in servers are accessed more often and are subject to more vibrations and more heat; drives in desktop enclosures have more potential points of failure between the power connector, the USB connector, and the USB- to- SATA logic board. Even so, the Backblaze study is the largest, most recent sample of hard drive failures we have access to, and it’s always a fascinating read. Our pick: 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Desktop. The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive is the fastest drive we tested. You can also stand it vertically to save desk space. The 3 TB was faster than most of the competition in our file transfer tests, and was one of the top performers in our benchmarks, as well.

We tested the 3 TB version, but we recommend the 4 TB model because it’s cheaper per terabyte and Seagate told us that they have identical performance. Though our runner- up’s average write speed was 2. MB/s faster, its average read speed was 1. MB/s slower. The Backup Plus was also faster than most of its competition in our multifile music and photo transfer tests, and it took just 4 minutes, 1. Blu- ray rip and 5 minutes, 1. The 4 TB Backup Plus is the most cost- effective drive we found, and (though we weren’t able to test it) in our years of testing external hard drives, we’ve found that larger drives tend to be equal to—or faster than—their lower- capacity counterparts.

Prices on hard drives fluctuate frequently, but as of this writing the 3 TB model of the Backup Plus is only $2. Our 4 TB pick is less expensive than the competition, too—the 5 TB Canvio is $3.