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These feature 2.5in, 5,400rpm drives of the sort we used to see in laptops, housed in a toughened casing and using a single USB connection for both power and data transfer. Today, external drives come in three basic forms, the biggest and most popular category of which is the portable HDD. How to choose the best external hard drive for you What type of drive should I buy?
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If you play games you can see 1TB go in just a handful of titles, with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War grabbing between 150 and 250GB on their own.
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That’s a problem when even budget smartphones can produce photos that take up 10 to 16MB of space, and hi-res audio files and 4K video files are even greedier.
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In fact, the recent shift from HDDs (hard disk drives) to SSDs (solid state drives) has meant that space has never been so tight – 256GB SSDs are still common, and only high-performance laptops and gaming PCs ship with 1TB or more. While computers keep growing ever more powerful, their storage never quite maintains the same pace.
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