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WHICH? REVIEWS: Hard drives

Too slow, too noisy, too hot, too weak, too power hungry. Our tech experts have carried out rigorous testing to find out which external hard drives are the best performers.

A hard drive (also called a hard disk) is really just a very high-capacity storage medium.

If your pc or laptop computer's hard drive gives up the ghost, you might not be able to retrieve any of the data that's stored on it. For this reason, it pays to keep a copy (known as a back up) of important files.

One of the simplest ways to do this is to attach an external hard drive.You can use them as additional storage, as somewhere to save copies of important files, or as a place to keep a mirror image of what's on your computer's internal hard drive so you can restore your system if your hard disk fails.

You may find you can back up everything that's important to you without buying either backup software or an external hard drive. If you just have a few important files saved on your computer (eg digital photos), it would probably be easier to save them onto a CD or DVD.

You can find out our Best Buy recommendations by taking out a trial to www.which.co.uk. Below, we explain more about the features of hard drives.

The basics

Your pc computer or laptop's hard disk is a bit like a big filing cabinet.

It stores all your data - eg programs and files - even when your computer is turned off. The amount of data a hard drive can store is measured in bytes.

The files that are created when you save digital photos or home videos are much larger than the ones you get when you save a typical word processing document (an average digital photo is about 500 Kilobytes).

Capacity

Just as we've started to create larger and larger files, so the size of hard drives has ballooned. Whereas a few years ago an 80GB hard disk was felt to be ample, you can now get home PCs with hard disks of 500GB and higher.

Types of external hard drive

There are several different kinds of external hard disk.

Standalone

The ones that you're likely to be most familiar with are the standalone drives which attach to and sit alongside your computer.

Portable

However, you can also get portable hard disks. These are generally smaller than the standalone drives both in terms of physical size and capacity. These are ideal for transferring files between computers.

Another advantage of a portable drive is that it's possible to keep your data separate from your computer. Most businesses back up their data and keep their backup off site.

Ideally, we should all do the same - keep a copy of important data (treasured photos, say) in case of fire or theft, for example. You might find a copy on CD or DVD kept at a friend's place would be just as good, though.

Network

If you have a home network, you could consider a network hard disk which you can connect to your network so everyone can save their files onto it.

The speed of a drive on your network will be directly affected by the slowest part of you network - eg your wifi connection or your router. For this reason, the speed of these drives is less of an issue and ease of set up and use should be a more important consideration.

Connections

USB

External hard drives connect to your computer via a cable. The most common type is USB 2.0 which will be compatible with most modern computers.

FireWire, Ethernet and eSata

However, you'll also find drives with FireWire connections (found on Macs as well as many PCs these days), Ethernet connections (for use with networks) and eSata connections.

Drive formats

You may come across the terms FAT32 and NTFS when you're choosing hard drives. These acronyms describe the way the data is stored inside the disk.

The maximum single file size you can save to a drive with FAT32 format is 4GB. This should be more than adequate for most people, but if you want to store some truly huge files, it's worth either buying an NTFS drive or converting the drive from FAT32 to NTFS (see your drive's manual for detail).

Apple Macs can't save to NTFS format so Mac users should use either FAT32 or an alternative format known as HFS (again, consult the drive's manual for more on this format).

So what's the best hard drive for you? By taking out a trial to www.which.co.uk you can discover all you need to know about hard drives and find out our Best Buy recommendations.