If your computer doesn’t support USB3, that’s okay it’s backwards compatible, and will operate at the slower USB2 speed. If your computer does support USB3 (usually indicated by the plastic in the USB connector being blue), backups will be faster.
There’s simply no reason not to ensure your new drive comes with a USB3 interface, even if your computer doesn’t support it. Some choices are easy some depend at least a little on your personal setup. There are several different types of external drives. Connection methods, and even power options, vary. The good news here is that in most cases, your backup requirements - even after tripling my recommendation - will likely be smaller than the average external hard drive currently available. If you want extra safety and breathing room, double (or even triple) my recommendation. That would be enough to hold two complete and compressed full-image backups, along with overhead information (such as recovery partitions) and a healthy collection of incremental backups as well.Īs I said, that’s a bare minimum, and there are certainly situations where it could end up not being enough, depending on how you configure your backups.
(Screenshot: )įor that machine, I would purchase a hard drive with a capacity of at least three times 478GB, or around 1.5TB (1434GB, rounded up).
#WD MY PASSPORT FOR MAC 1TB EXTERNAL USB 3.0 PORTABLE HARD DRIVE BLACK WINDOWS#
The rule of thumb I use is this: get an external drive at least three times as large as the amount of data you expect to back up.įor example, my primary Windows machine has a roughly 922GB (gigabyte) drive, of which around 478GB are used. Of course, more capacity also means a more expensive drive. It’s pretty easy to say you can never have too much capacity.
Opinions and quality change often, so make sure to pay attention to the dates of specific recommendations you find. SSDs are not worth the expense to be used as external drives, though they otherwise could be. Make sure the interface is USB3 or better. Begin by selecting an external drive that is sufficiently large to hold your backup images - I recommend three times your disk space used, at a minimum, though larger is always better.
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