External hard drives are very useful in homes and businesses today because they are an inexpensive way to add more storage space for your needs as well as provide data with a backup solution to make sure you do not lose any important files.

If you are currently looking for an external drive, you might find that narrowing down your choices might be more difficult than you imagined. In reality, choosing the right device for your needs is not as difficult as you might think. With so many companies touting the latest hardware though – it can look a little daunting at first.

Use the following tips to help in choosing an external HDD that is perfect for your needs:

Storage Space

External hard drives vary by the amount of storage space they offer. This is a major factor in determining personal/business storage needs and making a decision on what disk drive to buy. For example, if you only need your portable drive to serve as a storage space for pictures or text documents, then you probably will not need more than 200GB of space.

On the other hand, if you need it to store many movies, games, software, as well as other files that take up a lot of space, then you might consider going with something that is 500GB or bigger for your storage needs.

Price

Another important factor in choosing something which is going to suit you – is the price. Most people choose products based on price and storage drives are no exception. As a general rule, the more storage memory a USB drive offers, the pricier it will be to buy.

The price will also vary by brand as well as speed of the drive. Since memory space has been getting cheaper over time, you can buy a 1TB (1 terabyte = 1024Gigabytes) from Western Digital for around $100.

That is around the standard most people should expect to pay. It really depends though. A lot of different factors can affect the price.

Speed

All drives (whether portable or otherwise) differ in the speed they operate. When you look at a hard drive, you will notice that each has a RPM number at which it operates. The higher this number, the faster the drive will be able to process information. Daily tasks such as copying files from your computer to your backup drive will be completed faster if you have a drive that is running at 7,200 rpm as opposed to 5,400.

The connectivity also affects the speed. The difference between the old USB 2.0 and the newer USB 3.0 connection, for example, is the difference between a one minute transfer and a ten minute wait.

Brand

Choose a reliable brand for your external hard drive to avoid headaches later on. Solid brands for external hard drives include Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. One thing you can do to save money, is to compare removable media (from different brands) that have the same specifications and choose one which is either on sale or cheaper. This will provide you with good quality and help you save some money on buying one.

Warranty

Be sure to check the warranty on the drive (or any piece of hardware) that you’re interested in. If you’ve stumbled upon two drives from different brands that offer the same specifications and features and cannot decide which one to go with, look at the warranty provided. For example, Western Digital has a 5-year limited warranty on their products but Seagate only offers a 2-year limited warranty.

By following these tips, you can easily narrow down your choices for an external hard drive and choose one that is best for your needs.