Why you should invest in a new hard drive

The capacity of hard disks has multiplied over the years at a rate with which not even house prices in Harrogate can keep pace. A back-of-an envelope calculation tells me that the first model I bought, in the 1980s, was five million times smaller than the one I picked up in Currys' sale last month.
A portable hard drive could be a lifesaverA portable hard drive could be a lifesaver
A portable hard drive could be a lifesaver

Not only is the new one vastly more capacious; it’s also physically smaller and considerably cheaper.

The first disks, inside PCs which look primitive today, took an age to access the little data they contained, and had to be “parked” every time the computer was turned off. Just a dozen MP3 music tracks would have filled mine completely, so it was just as well they hadn’t been invented.

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Today, of course, we fill our hard drives with everything from high-definition movies to our entire family photo library – and that’s fine until they suddenly go wrong and render the whole lot inaccessible.

This happens more often that you might imagine, since most hard disks, in spite of their increasing miniaturisation, are still mechanical devices housing precision moving parts not unlike those of a traditional wristwatch. That’s why a new generation of solid-state disks is gaining traction: they’re faster, more reliable, and they don’t make that familiar gnawing noise while they’re accessing your data. But at the moment they’re around four times more expensive.

So if your computer has become your de facto repository for your memories and your audio-video collection, it makes sense to duplicate them across more than one drive – an exercise which, now you can pick up portable, plug-in storage at near-pocket money prices, has never been easier.

The new standard for external hard drives is USB3, which is more than ten times faster than previous USB devices. You need a PC or laptop with a USB3 socket to take advantage of the speed boost, but the drives will work even without one, albeit at USB2 speed. You can expect to pay just over £40 for a terabyte of storage – an unheard-of unit of measurement just a few years ago – and around £65 for two terabytes.

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Once plugged in, you can make safety copies by simply dragging files and folders from one drive to another – or you can automate the process with a backup app like the free version of SyncBack for Windows.

Adding a permanent second drive to the inside of a desktop PC is an even speedier way of increasing and backing up your storage – and it’s easier than you might think, if you’re not averse to taking the back off your base unit. Your computer’s innards will include space for an extra disk, and, unless it’s very old, will use a system of connectivity known as SATA to connect it to the main board. All you have to do is slot your new disk into its waiting receptacle, connect one of the spare power cables floating around inside the casing, and plug in a SATA cable to one of the vacant ports on the main board.

Whether permanent or portable, your new drive will show up on screen as an extra letter below your original hard disc and DVD. One day, you might be glad it’s there.

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