If your computer’s hard drive is damaged, you risk losing all of your digital content. An external hard drive gives you portable, on-the-go storage at your fingertips ( Backup Plus). Upgrading your computer’s internal hard drive ( BarraCuda) provides built-in storage for all of your files. Should I Choose an Internal or External Drive?

However, you’ll see noticeable improvement on a 7,200 RPM hard drive with larger files and applications. The same holds true with internal drives, especially with smaller files. But with external drives, you’ll hardly notice a difference between the two RPM speeds. The faster a disk (platter) spins, the faster your computer can find the file you want.Ī 7,200 RPM hard drive is obviously faster than a 5,400 RPM hard drive. Spin speed (rotations per minute, or RPM) is relatively important. 2Īlthough some drives are pre-formatted to work with either a PC or Mac, any drive can be reformatted to work with either type of computer. Here is an estimate of how much you can store on a hard drive (up to 10 TB). If you want to back up your entire computer or several computers - or if you store a lot of video and/or audio - you’ll want a larger drive ( Backup Plus Desktop Drive). If you simply need to transfer a limited number of files between a computer and a backup drive, a smaller drive ( Expansion Drive or Backup Plus ) will work. A hard drive determines the size of digital files in terms of megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), and terabytes (TB).

Documents (text) are generally very small whereas pictures are large, music is even larger, and videos are the largest. Hard drives can be external or internal.Įverything stored on a hard drive is measured in terms of its file size. Your documents, pictures, music, videos, programs, application preferences, and operating system represent digital content stored on a hard drive. A hard drive is the hardware component that stores all of your digital content.

External hard drive for pictures only