Your Hard Drive Buying Guide

 

whether for personal or professional use, choosing a hard drive depends on several criteria such as its capacity, its form factor, its speed or its cache memory. We’ll go through each characteristic point by point to help guide you toward the choice that best suits you.

 

 

 

By default a hard drive is internal, meaning it is directly built into your central unit and connected to the SATA port on the motherboard.

 

An external hard drive is intended for users on the go or for people who want extra storage space.  It is in fact an internal hard drive housed in an enclosure, allowing it to be connected via USB to a computer, TV, or games console.

 

 

 

The main difference between these 2 form factors: their storage capacity.

 

3.5″ hard drives have the advantage of holding more data for the same budget than a 2.5″ hard drive, as well as being faster in read/ write speed.

3.5″ HDDs are mainly found in our desktop computers, and 2.5″  in laptops.

 

 

Nowadays 2.5″ hard drives are generally intended for external use, as they are easy to carry and, unlike 3.5″ external hard drives, they are self-powered (they do not need to be plugged into a power source)

 

 

HDD or SSD?

An SSD uses flash memory, which is faster to write to, smaller and consumes less power than an HDD hard drive. Designed for photo editing, music production or video games, it nevertheless has the drawback of offering less storage capacity than an HDD for the same budget (on average 15x more space on an HDD).

The HDD remains the ideal solution for pure, no-frills storage and its lifespan over time is longer than that of an SSD.

To sum up, choose an SSD if you’re looking for performance and speed, and an HDD if storage capacity is your priority.

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The wifi hard drive

At home as in the office, one of the main advantages of the wifi hard drive is being able to share content between several connected devices (computer, smartphone, tablet, games console, next-gen TVs). Easy to set up thanks to the apps provided by manufacturers, it also has the advantage of being as compact as an external hard drive while also being fully autonomous (rechargeable batteries)

Network hard drives / NAS

Larger and more expensive than a wifi hard drive, the NAS network hard drive allows access to the data it contains from anywhere via a wifi network by connecting to its IP address. Most cloud hard drive models offer automatic data backup, as well as secure access.

Data recovery remains more volatile on SSD and requires more work. Chronodisk offers its expertise in recovering your lost data, whatever the medium.