The power bank also allows you to charge smartphones or tablets on the go. Its solid aluminum enclosure also makes it a great option for a slight degree of portability.
The USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C connector can give it 45 watts of power right from your computer and is especially well suited to MacBook Air users since it does not require an Apple power cable. Our deep-dive reviews help you track down the right external hard drive. We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives inside and requiring a dedicated power cable plugged into AC power to work. While it is true that there are cloud services that can provide storage solutions, these require subscription fees that can increase with usage. Various models include WD Elements WD My Book. This is an affordable but powerful storage option with a hard drive of 5400 rpm and a Micro-USB 3.0 connection. Which one is right for you?
Read on for our labs-tested favorites, followed by the buying basics you should know when buying an external drive. 
You may see this referred to in conversation as the LaCie rugged mini or the LaCie rugged SSD. The TVS XT models feature Thunderbolt 3 ports, which allow multiple devices to access files from the drive simultaneously via direct connection and wirelessly as well. LaCie Rugged Mini External Hard Drive is the ultimate storage device designed for those who need to protect their photos and videos, no matter where life takes them. It also comes with a 5-year warranty. Almost every recent drive we have reviewed supports USB, and the same goes for laptops and desktops. 
Your subscription has been confirmed. The RAID device itself should not be a place to store photos, and this misunderstanding has led to many photographers losing a copious amount of work when they delete original files. Any portable platter-based hard drive should fit easily in a purse or even a coat pocket. 
You'll only see the speed benefits of Thunderbolt 3, however, if you have a drive that's SSD-based, or a multi-drive, platter-based desktop DAS that is set up in a RAID array. Because after finishing this guide, you will know the benefits of each external drive option and how to choose the right one for your photography.
Today, it is common to keep an entire RAW image library on an external drive. The traditional HDD uses a spinning platter to write, record, store, and release datasort of like a record player. The best storage solution is to use an external hard drive or even multiple drives. This is a docking station that enables the use of internal drives as external drives. The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is ruggedized and water- and dust resistant and features a solid-state design to ensure long-term reliability in the most demanding environments. The only downside to this particular hard drive is that it comes with a higher price tag, but it is simply invaluable if you are concerned about external damage. The real value lies in what's on your drive, not the drive itself. The drive platters' own speed is the limiter, not the flavor of USB 3. You can treat it as a DIY external hard drive. Because there is no spinning platter or moving magnetic head, if you bump the SSD while you're accessing its data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable. Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
As such, this is often rated as a good drive on a budget, but not one that should be moved outside of its permanent location. This is where an external hard drive comes into play. At the other end of the physical-size spectrum are portable drives. A vault for sensitive data, the iStorage DiskAshur DT2 is a desktop hard drive offering huge capacity (up to 18TB), a host of security features with multiple government certifications, and a relatively low cost per gigabyte. There are options ranging from 1 TB up to 5 TB, and it easily connects with PC, Mac, and Thunderbolt 3 and 4 ports, so whether you use the Mac OS or Windows youll be good to go. It is shock resistant, drops up to four feet, and is dust and water resistant. I've also written a host of articles about astronomy, space science, travel photography, and astrophotography for PCMag and its past and present sibling publications (among them, Mashable and ExtremeTech), as well as for the PCMag Digital Edition.
A desktop drive with a single platter mechanism will typically use a 3.5-inch drive inside and comes in capacities up to 12TB, though a few 16TB single drives in external chassis have started to emerge. The only case with hard drives where the USB standard matters much is if you connect a drive to an old-style, low-bandwidth USB 2.0 port, which is better reserved for items like keyboards and mice. The 8TB version of the Western Digital My Book is a deep well of affordable storage for your photos, music, videos, and more. Western Digital Desktop hard drives come in several iterations of 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18 TB.
Since LaCie is a subsidiary of Seagate, it comes with a Seagate IronWolf Pro 7200 hard drive. But, I am confident that we will complete the transition from old mechanical HDDs to modern SDD technology in a couple of years. Even so, RAID devices are great tools for business continuity and managing your hard drives, through processes such as data transfer. The protective rubber case around the device gives it an additional layer of protection against drops of 3 meters (roughly 8 or 9 feet), and IP65 dust and water protection. USB ports are ubiquitous, and many external drives now come with cables with both rectangular USB Type-A connectors and oval-shaped USB Type-C ones to enable adapter-free connections to PCs that have only one type. Photographers are often on the go, and an external hard drive is portable and convenient. The following are portable drives. Password protection with hardware encryption is designed to prevent unauthorized access to your data. Requirements: The requirements for traveling external hard drives are compactness, low energy consumption, and durability. External SSDs offer at least twice that speed and now, often much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps. ), how rugged it is, the interface it uses to connect to your PC, and even what colors it comes in. It is the SSD drive, which means it is compact and does not have any moving parts. If you are looking for the best external hard drive for photographers, youve come to the right place. And let's not even talk about the cost of 4TB and 8TB external SSDs. The following options are not portable drives, but TB external hard drive options that should remain in your home or studio, or wherever your home base is for working with your Lightroom presets. Many people have commented that the Seagate options are very similar to those in the Western Digital Elements series, and that the best bet for a photograph in need of storage is to see which model is on sale when they need it. Thunderbolt 3 vs. USB-C: What's the Difference? The G drives come in two versionswith a USB3 connection and Thunderbolt. Its got a phenomenal ability to read at 1050 Mbps and write and 1000 Mbps with its USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 connection. These larger models are more expensive but also much more capaciousthink 16TB or more (in that case, populated by two 8TB drive mechanisms). WD My Passport SSD is a portable, rugged, and shock-resistant external hard drive with blazing fast NVMe technology and write/read speeds of up to 1000MB/s. The next several devices RAID drives.
If you like photography, theres a good chance that you like to take a lot of pictures. Perhaps the only thing you don't need to pay all that much attention to is the warranty. It describes the sequence of steps and procedures completed from capturing an image to its final output, which can be in the form of a high-quality digital image or a print. These RAID drives are commonly thought of as backups, but that is not really true. So if youve got a studio where multiple photographers are going to be editing on different computers, this is probably the best option for you. They are relatively affordable with a 5400 rpm drive and Micro-USB 3.0 connection, with read/write capabilities of 185 Mbps. In addition to storing large media collections, these drives can also serve as inexpensive repositories for backups of your computer's hard drive that you schedule, using either software that comes with the drive or a third-party backup utility.
Other factors include the physical size of the drive (is it designed to be carted around, or to sit on your desk? Some models include plastic bumpers, and some even meet military standards for shock and dust protection. Solid state drives (SSD) are electronic devices that use semiconductor chips (flash memory) to store data. Its PCIe NVMe technology facilitates speeds that are double those of T5 devices, bringing users to 1050 Mbps for reading and writing. You don't have to worry about the differences among these three USB specs when looking at ordinary hard drives, though. An external hard drive is a portable digital storage device that can connect to your computer with a USB cord, firewire, or even wirelessly. There are two main types of hard drives: solid state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD). And on a 16 GB hard drive, such a photographer could only keep around 200 photographs. If you carry your drive around frequently, you'll want to pay attention to how rugged the drive is. The rpm speed is also lower than that of WD drives placed into Sandisk products, some of which can get up to 7200 rpm. The only problem with taking lots of pictures is that you need a place to store them. It has an internal battery and a dedicated SD memory card reader that automatically backs up the contents of the memory cards to the internal drive. By contrast, an SSD leverages new technology to store data on microchips, which means they can read and write data faster and they are less prone to the mechanical failure that can occur over time with an HDD.
For all these reasons you really would benefit from locating the best external hard drive, just like you would the best laptop for photo editing. These connection types are ever in flux, but these days, most external hard drives use a flavor of USB, or in rare cases, Thunderbolt. WD My Passport Wireless is an external hard drive equipped with an SD 3.0 card reader. Right now, the fastest mainstream connection type is Thunderbolt 3, which is handy assuming you have a newer laptop or desktop with a Thunderbolt 3 port. It's geared to macOS users, but it will please anyone with an eye for style in their gadgets. Copyright 2022 Sleeklens. With the introduction of digital cameras, the average cost per shot we take has become very low and much more cost-effective than film. Here is a list of the external hard drives that I use as well as some added recommendations. 
This interface piggybacks on a USB Type-C connector (not all USB Type-C ports support Thunderbolt 3, though) and offers blazing peak throughput of up to 40GBps. It features USB3, FireWire and eSATA ports that make it a very versatile model for any environment. Requirements: The requirements for external hard drives used for backup are large volume and affordability. Michael Moodie is a Freelance Photographer and Photojournalist. At the time of writing this article, the cost of SSDs with a volume capacity higher than 2TB is cost-prohibitive for most photographers. As you can see, solid state drives (SSD) outperform hard drives (HDD) in every category and, without doubt, are the best choice for soring data for photographers. The WD My Passport SSD is compatible with USB 3.2 Gen-2 and USB-C (USB-A for older systems). Sure, a long warranty is nice. Your email is safe with us. This is not exactly an external hard drive but it carries the same function as my WD 4TB My Book Desktop drive. We won't spam you. The Western Digital software lets you efficiently manage data and backup passwords that come with 256-bit AES hardware encryption. Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant. It comes in storage options ranging from 1 TB to 5 TB and is a bit less expensive than some of its competitors. PCMag, PCMag.com and PC Magazine are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. These RAID enclosures feature Thunderbolt 3 connections and a DisplayPort connection for your desktop monitor. Seagate is another name for desktop storage and the Seagate Expansion Desktop comes in storage options of 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB, 10 TB, 12 TB, and 16 TB. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature-length film, or a year's worth of family photos) to an external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning drive.
The USB-C port comes with a USB-C cable and a USB-C to USB-A adaptor so that you can connect the WD hard drive to a Mac or PC, which is great for Windows fans and Mac users.
External hard drives play an important role in the multi-step process of digital workflow and cover three essential areas of the process. Some come in multiple colors, while others are super-slim and ready to be tossed in a pocket. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time. A built-in SD card reader allows fast media offloads, giving you the freedom to transfer large quantities of photos and videos while on the go without the need for a laptop. PCMag Digital Group. Nude Photography, Overwhelmed? (Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.). How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is second only to the type of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data.
They're ever more capacious for the money, too. Endowed with a gamer aesthetic, the WD Black P10 Game Drive can serve as a simple, stylish repository for your massive game library at a reasonable price. The hardware does not comprise RAID controllers but uses software controllers from the SoftRaid brand, which can be licensed with your unit when you purchase it. Some hard drives are portable and can draw their power through the USB cord, while others need to be connected to a traditional outlet via a power cord, in addition to the data cord that transfers photos and videos. Plus, it is water-resistant, dust-resistant and shock-resistant, a true dream for any traveling photographer.
Please verify your software version before proceeding. External drives like external SSD or external HDD provide external storage solutions for photographers whose Macbook Pro or desktop PC does not have enough space to hold all their photographs or videos. Sleeklens is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. With the introduction of fast interface connection technologies (USB 3.0, Fire Wire, Thunderbolt), it became possible to use an external hard drive as a companion to or an extension of internal drives. A hard drive as a device is also more durable than something like an SD card, so it offers a more secure and permanent storage solution. For ordinary external hard drives, Thunderbolt is very much the exception, not the rule. It does not exactly fit the requirements for a travel drive because it is bulky and much heavier, but it has two significant features that have drastically changed the way I travel.