External hard drive, how choice?

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I'm thinking of buying an external hard drive, but I do not know whether it would be compatible with my computer. I do not know whether I have USB3, with many ads I write that the disk drive USB3, I have a USB but I do not know if it's USB3

If the USB port on the PC is USB2 or ordinary USB then USB3 devices will work but at a lower speed.

Thanks:-)

My computer have motherboard Gigabyte ep43-ds3, does it have USB3 or ordinary USB?

Your motherboard has usb 2.0 but you can buy a usb 3.0 PCI card if you have a spare slot . Will you be transferring large files 10gb+ ? Have you considered an internal drive?

A USB 3 socket tends to have a blue plastic inside, and if you look carefully inside it has 5 flat, slightly recessed contacts at the front, with 4 more raised ones behind (the ones for USB2 compatability).

If your computer has PCI-Express slots on the motherboard, you can get cards to add USB3 capability, that either have sockets on the back of the card, or connectors on the card itself for sockets on a separate front panel.

USB3 is much faster than USB2, so it's worth getting a PCI card to support an external drive.

Be sure to read reviews from other buyers before picking your drive.

Lots of external drives are garbage. The reviews give you an idea what the good/bad rate is on what's sold by that supplier (e.g., Newegg or Amazon).

Exactly. It is no accident that the warranties on external drives are generally much shorter than the same drives sold as internal drives.

One should never depend on an external hard drive as some kind of backup device. They aren't backup devices at all.

I know one woman who was using one as her so-called backup. When it failed she contacted the manufacturer about recovering the files and they laughed at her for thinking that it is a backup device.

At best, external hard drives should only serve as backup devices for data that you don't really expect to need again.

If you're in Europe, the law states that ALL electronic goods have a 2 year warranty, regardless of what the seller or manufacturer may otherwise tell you.

Warranties never cover data recovery though.

I you want to protect against a drive failing you can get an external enclosure that supports RAID 1 across 2 drives. That at least will ensure that a single drive failing won't lose your data. It's not considered backup though, because you can still delete files (or a virus/hacker can) from both drives at once. For that you'd need a 3rd drive that you regularly copy everything to (or your backup software does).


I went for a Synology NAS with a pair of 4TB drives in RAID 1, which is connected to my router, as opposed to a USB drive. The advantage of a NAS is that I can access it from all the computers in the house at once (through wifi if it's my laptop of tablet), without any one of them having to be turned on to access it. I could add an external USB 4TB drive, and it would do automatic backups to that.

That's not so.

External HDDs are pretty much just internal HDDs with a case and interface cable.

The problem is that a lot of external HDDs are cheap junk mass produced. If internal HDDs were cranked out that way (and some have been), the rash of failures would cut them out of the marketplace (which is what happened to a lot of them).

A quality external HDD costs more, but they can be as rock-solid as the best internal HDDs. I've got an "off-brand" 1 TB drive, but it's been solid, and I use it as a redundant HDD backup to another one which is made by WD.

Being a savvy shopper and balancing your budget with quality purchases is the key.

It's a backup device only if you define a backup device as being something you can copy a file to in hopes that it might be available when you need it.

Of course, if someone comes in and steals your computer, they are likely to take the "backup" with it.

If there is a massive electrical surge that fries your computer, there went your so-called "backup" as well.

Fire? Once again, it's gone.

Any decent backup device should be strictly media and contain no electronics. If it contains media and electronics as in a disk drive, then there are two major areas where it can be damaged or destroyed -- both the media and the electronics. And the electronics is generally the more likely to be damaged. Keep them separate and if your drive for reading the media fails, replace it and then read the media.

Write it to a backup media and store the media. Need to restore the data, it's waiting for you.

The gold standard for decades has been backup tapes. It's generally thought that the backup tapes are good for about 25 years of storage.

These days, some places are going to DVDs for backup (Used DVD+R rather than DVD-R) with expected useful lifetimes when stored in climate controlled vaults of 100 years or more.

Backups have to be what's practical. DVD media only holds a bit over 4 GB and in limited file sizes. Good for backing up set files, but not good for imaging HDDs or anything large you want fast recovery or updating on.

Tape is slow. Good DVDs have long shelf life (I did archiving work), but again, you get speed and file size storage issues.

If you want to be able to restore a damaged/corrupted HDD partition FAST, external HDD is your best bet to avoid a mechanical/electrical issue that damaged the primary HDD partition, and an internal HDD is the fastest way to repair a HDD partition if the corruption only affected the primary partition and not all HDDs on the system.

Any "backup" stored at the same site always faces a risk of theft/fire/flood damage.

It depends on what level(s) of redundancy you want to employ and how fast/convenient you want your recovery options to be.

All the "cloud" service BS on the market is only good for backing up files. Few can afford the bandwidth needed to store an entire HDD partition on the cloud or be able to recover it over a broadband connection in a meaningful time frame. Backing up files but doing nothing to backup your OS partition is only half a solution at best. Most people's problems (that I've fixed) involved a buggered OS and not their personal data files.