Ignoring the rise and fall of the floppy disk, for a long time, hard disks were the most common storage devices. In this guide, you will learn what the difference is between the different types of drives as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. You might be curious to know, what’s the right hard disk for your Mac? Choosing which drive to use in a computer involves a trade-off between speed, capacity, and cost. And you can buy external or internal drives of three types: SSD, hybrid (fusion) drive, or hard drive. Macs are currently sold with three types of storage devices: hard drives (only in the base 21.5″ iMac and Mac mini), SSDs, and fusion drives. An iPhone or iPad contains flash memory, and a desktop or laptop computer contains either a solid state drive (SSD), which is flash memory, or a hard disk. Now that USB 2.0 has been banished from all self-respecting storage, we find USB 3 as the standard for connection, letting these portable drives perform as quickly as the little disks inside will allow.Apple + How To How to Choose the Right Hard Disk for Your MacĮvery computing device you own contains some sort of storage. Some portable drives include software that can help automate this process, keeping your selected directories in sync whenever you plug in the drive or by a daily schedule. You may be able to keep a perfect clone of your entire computer’s internal drive, on standby and ready in the event that the computer is lost or its drive should malfunction.Īlternatively, you may choose just to back up the most important files and documents from your user libraries, such as text documents, photos, films, music and stored email. Off-loading your music collection alone from a computer to a portable drive can be a godsend in freeing valuable space if your laptop has limited storage.Īnother popular application of portable storage is for keeping critical backups of your data held on a PC or laptop. Even the smallest portable drives are likely to be 128GB in size, which is enough to space thousands of CD albums in lossless FLAC format, or even more in lower quality MP3 or AAC formats.

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