If you plan on taking your external drive with you to places like work or class, you’ll want to get a Seagate external drive that uses an SSD: it’s much smaller and is powered by USB, so it’s easy to throw in your bag and take with you. Do you need your external drive to be portable? On the other hand, an SSD may not hold as much, but it’s often your best best for situations where fast access to your data is critical, for example, if you’re planning to use it with a gaming console or streaming box. Hard drives wear out faster, but they’re more affordable and are ideal for backing up data, especially if you have a lot of large video files. There are two types of external drives: the traditional hard drive, which is built with moving parts and has high capacity, and the solid-state drive (SSD), which is much faster, but typically only comes in smaller capacities. Do you want a solid-state drive or a hard drive? Our best advice: determine what your total data storage needs are today and buy a drive that’s at least 40% larger than that. If you’re buying an external hard drive with several terabytes of space, be prepared for file transfers to be a little slower. If you’re buying a faster solid-state drive (SSD), you’ll have to settle for less storage. The most important question to ask yourself before you start shopping is how much file storage you need today, and how much extra space you’ll need for tomorrow. Considerationsīefore you look at any specific models, answer these questions. This is true across all brands and drives, not just Seagate hardware. In general, you can expect roughly 7% less storage space in reality than the listed capacity. Capacities are estimates, because data storage is measured using base 2 math, which doesn’t easily reconcile with the base 10 math we use every day. The amount of storage you get from an external drive is less than the drive’s full capacity.

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