As anyone who has delved into the world of virtual reality knows, there are a lot of cables and connectors — and none of them seem to be the same. But that may be about to change, thanks to a newly formed industry group known as ICVR.

The joint venture, unveiled Tuesday, is initially comprised of Analogix Semiconductor, Tencent, LG Electronics and Dell. It aims to standardize connectivity between VR accessories and the source devices to which they’re connected, such as PCs and phones.

The proposed VR specification will use the DisplayPort video protocol over a USB-C connector. It will be available for current and future ICVR members in the third quarter of 2017.

Two challenges we can see right off the bat: The new proposed standard doesn’t seem to account for the wireless headset prototypes already being shown off by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook. And with the Lightning connector on iPhones and iPads, it’s hard to imagine Apple joining this ICVR anytime soon.

But you have to start somewhere — and USB-C seems like a better option than the tangle of ports that current PC-based VR systems use.

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You now can add your location to your posts on Reddit.

As first reported by Mashable, the famous forum-based site that calls itself “the front page of the internet” has just partnered with Foursquare to enable posts from its mobile app to include geotags. Users can choose to narrow down the location to a specific venue or keep it as general as country only.

Adding locations to posts is a unique approach for Reddit, since one of its appeals is the fact that it allows users to be anonymous. However, the website’s geotag is optional and users can opt to not tag at all. Currently, the tag is only available for each individual post, and users can’t search for posts by location.

Foursqure confirmed the partnership with Reddit to CNET and revealed that the geo-tagging feature for Reddit will be live today.

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WD on Monday unveiled its latest solid-state drives for consumers, the WD Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD and the SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD. Both use 3D NAND technology.

3D NAND, where the drive’s flash memory cells are stacked up in multiple layers, was first introduced with the Samsung 850 Pro, allowing for significantly more cells in the same number of wafer bits. This greatly increases the density and means, among other things, making it possible to have more storage space for less cost.

Existing solid-state drives — including the Samsung 850 Pro ($78 at Amazon), Samsung 850 Evo and the Crucial MX300 — use 32-layer 3D NAND. WD’s new SSDs, however, are the first built with 64-layer 3D NAND, further reducing the cost.

According to WD, both drives will be available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities in the standard 2.5-inch configuration. The WD Blue will also come in the M.2 2280 form factor. Both drives are slated to deliver up to 560 megabytes per second and 530MBps of sequential read and write speeds, respectively. And both share the same pricing. They start at $99.99 (roughly £78 or AU$130) and include a three-year warranty.

There seem to be just minor differences between the two drives. According to the company, the WD Blue is designed for system builders and general computing, whereas the SanDisk Ultra is aimed at gamers and creative enthusiasts. Both drives are slated to ship in the third quarter of this year.

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Facebook on Thursday announced on an official blog post the commercial launch of Express W-Fi in India, a service that offers “fast, reliable and affordable” data connections via local hotspots.

According to the post, Facebook touts Express Wi-Fi as a solution that provides “a low-cost, high bandwidth alternative” for getting online and to access apps, download and stream content. People interested in using Express Wi-Fi can sign up with a retailer and purchase a daily, weekly or monthly data pack. It’s unclear exactly how much its costs to use Express Wi-Fi, and Facebook’s release says rates will be set by its partners.

The social networking giant also announced a partnership with Bharti Airtel to deploy an additional 20,000 hotspots over the next few months, enabling millions more Indians to be connected.

Facebook says its goal is to “grow the number of Express Wi-Fi hotspots in India rapidly.” Currently only 360 million Indians, out of a population of 1.3 billion, have internet access, according to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI’s) Performance Indicator Report.

Facebook has been testing the service in India since last year. With the launch today, Express Wi-Fi is now live in five countries: India, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria and Indonesia.

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If you’ve been struggling to find enough space to store your drone’s footage when you’re out and about, Seagate has something for you.

The storage vendor announced today the Seagate DJI Fly Drive, its first portable storage device created in partnership with drone maker DJT. No, this is not a drive that you mount on your drone; rather, it’s for storing content after each flight.

For the most part, the Fly Drive is similar to a regular portable drive. It has up to 2TB of storage space, supports USB 3.1 and has an USB-C port. This means it will also work with a Thunderbolt 3 port. What is special about it, however, is the integrated UHS-II-rated SD card slot, allowing you to quickly copy any SD card’s content.

What’s more, the drive has a protective bumper that keeps it safe against shocks and drops. Seagate says the drive also includes a two-month subscription to Adobe Premiere Pro, which will cost about $20/month going forward.

The Fly Drive is slated to be available this summer with the price starting at $120.

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If you’re looking to make some real use of your new Macbook Pro‘s Thunderbolt 3 ports, LaCie has something for you.

The storage vendor announced today the Thunderbolt 3 LaCie 2big Dock for professionals, an external storage device that can also work as a docking station for other peripheral devices, including SD Cards, Compact Flash Cards and USB-C, DisplayPort as well as other regular USB and Thunderbolt 3 devices.

The dock itself has two drive bays to host two 3.5-inch standard internal hard drive that can be set up in either RAID-0 (for maximum storage space and fast performance) or RAID-1 (redundancy against a single disk failure).

LaCie says you can expect the dock to deliver sustained speed of up to 440 megabyte per second via Thunderbolt 3, meaning you can transfer one hour worth of 4K video footage in just one minutes. The company says its USB and Thunderbolt ports can also be used as charging ports.

The new storage device will use Seagate IronWolf Pro enterprise-class drives and includes LaCie RAID Manager software that enables users to manage its RAID setup and monitor system’s health.

The new LaCie 2big Dock is set to be available this summer in 12TB, 16TB or 20TB capacities and comes with a five-year warranty. Its pricing will be available then.

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Upgrade your Windows 10 PC with an SSD and be happier…

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Editors’ note: This is a regularly updated article.

Traditional hard drives will be here for long time thanks to their large storage space and affordability. However, there is no question that solid-state drives (SSDs) will be the future of storage. Most new computers now come with an SSD as the main storage device. If you have an older (or a new budget-class) machine that still runs on a regular hard drive, it’s definitely time to upgrade. (Here’s some instructions on how to upgrade on a PC and a Mac.) The speed gains you’ll experience from upgrading to an SSD will be by far the biggest performance improvement your computer ever has.

But is it all unicorns and lollipops with SSDs? Not quite. SSDs still fall short in a few places compared to normal hard drives, in particular regarding their write endurance. This means you can only write a finite amount of data to an SSD before you can’t write anymore. In this post, I’ll talk about this shortcoming and how to mitigate it. Most of my suggestions will be focused on Windows PCs.

Writing on a hard drive

The platter is the main component of a traditional hard drive. It’s usually made of glass or aluminum and is the portion that stores your information. It’s coated with a thin layer of metal that can be either magnetized or demagnetized. And the write process is straightforward: the read/write head of the drive hovers on top of the platter and magnetizes and demagnetizes sectors (tiny parts of the platters) into 1 or 0 values to store information in binary patterns. When you overwrite data (that is, when you write new data to an area that already contains data) the process is the same; the sectors just need to be magnetized or demagnetized differently. In other words, writing to a hard drive is always the same, no matter if the drive currently contains data or not.

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Writing on an SSD

Writing is totally different and much more complicated with SSDs. There are three important things to remember.

First, aside from when an SSD is brand new and contains no data, writing to an SSD is the process of erasing existing information from the flash memory cells and then programming new information onto them. No new information can be programmed to a cell unless the old data is first erased. For this reason, the process of writing to an SSD is often referred to as program/erase cycles or P/E cycles.

Second, P/E cycles are finite. Each P/E cycle exhausts the memory cell a little more, and after so many cycles it will be totally worn out and become unusable. In a way, this is similar to writing on a piece of paper using a pencil and an eraser. You can only erase the pigment so many times before the piece of paper becomes worn out or even torn and can’t be written on anymore.

And finally, memory cells are organized in pages (each page contains many cells) and blocks (each block contains many pages.) Here’s the tricky part: you can write a page at a time, but you can erase only a block at a time. Now imagine when you want to save a Word document with the changes that can fit in just one page, the SSD needs to first copy the rest of the used pages of the containing block to another place, erase the entire block, then program (or write) all of those pages and the page with the new information. This is called Write Amplification — meaning generally an SSD needs to write a lot more than the actual amount of data you want to write — which further uses up its P/E cycles.

All these result in a few facts. First, SSDs almost always have different write and read speeds. And second, to write optimally, they all need free space to accommodate Write Amplification. Some SSD features Over Provisioning, which is a dedicated amount of free space, non-accessible by users, used only to facilitate its write operation. Without this feature, an SSD’s write speed will get progressively slower as it gets full.

Wear leveling

Now before you let out a “D’oh!” and return your beloved, recently purchased SSD, be aware that the number of potential P/E cycles for an SSD is exponentially larger than that of a sheet of paper. In addition, modern SSDs have technologies that increase write efficiency and reduce wear on its storage cells. Among these technologies, the most important is the “wear-leveling” algorithms that effectively make sure all the drive’s memory chips are used up, cell by cell, before the first cell can be written to again. This also means that SSDs of larger capacities generally have longer life spans than do smaller ones.

So how long is long? To help users estimate how long an SSD will last, most SSD manufacturers present the drive’s endurance by the amount of data that can be written to the drive. For example, the 750GB Crucial MX300 has an endurance of 220TBW, meaning you can write 220 terabytes of data to the drive before it becomes unreliable. To put this in perspective, if you write 50GB of data per day every day to the drive, it will take you some 12 years to wear it out. Most other SSDs have similar or better endurance ratings. Generally the larger the drive, the higher he endurance.

Most of us actually write just a fraction of 50GB of data — which is about two Blu-ray discs’ worth — on our computer’s host drive on a daily basis, and many days we don’t write anything at all. Note that watching movies, reading PDF files, or viewing photos doesn’t count as writing; that’s reading, which has no effect on an SSD’s life expectancy. Only activities like copying music from another drive, downloading files, editing files, or backing up your phone, and so on require you to write to the drive.

That said, if you use an SSD the way you would a hard drive, chances are it will still last longer than a regular hard drive would. But you can do more.

What you can do

The key to maximize the life span of an SSD is to reduce writing to it. Apart from making an effort to reduce unnecessary copying of files, downloading of data, and so on, you should note that there are a few operating system (OS) settings, as well as common tasks designed for regular hard drives, that shouldn’t be used with SSDs.

Upgrade to the latest operating systems: Modern OSes are designed with built-in support for SSDs. That said, make sure your computer run the latest OS. Currently that’s Windows 10 1703 (Creators Update) and MacOS Sierra.

Benchmarking: Most of us want to find out just how fast our new SSD is by copying files from one place to another or using disk-benchmarking software. While this is fun and the information is useful to know, it does waste the drive’s P/E cycles. Avoid it if you can.

Hibernation: (Not to be confused with sleep mode, which won’t affect SSDs’ life span.) Most operating systems have a hibernation feature. During hibernation, the contents of the system memory (the place where currently running programs and information still being processed reside) are written to the computer’s internal storage device (your hard drive or SSD) before the computer is powered off. When the computer is restarted, the system reloads the saved content back into the system memory, and hence restores the computer to the state it was in before it was turned off. Once the loaded, the saved content is deleted from storage.

As you can imagine, the hibernation process can use gigabytes of storage space over time, which translates to a large amount of writing on the internal storage. More specifically, a computer with 4GB of RAM requires some 4GB of storage space to create a hibernation file. Sometimes a computer goes into hibernation by itself, but you can avoid this by completely turning off the hibernation function. Here’s how:

• Right click on the Start button (or press Windows + X) to open the WinX menu, then click on Windows Powershell (Admin) and answer “Yes” to the User Account Control security prompt.
• When the Powershell prompt window appears, type in powercfg -h off and then press Enter.

That’s it — your computer will never go into hibernation mode again. To turn this feature back on, repeat this process and type powercfg -h on before pressing Enter.

A computer that’s equipped with an SSD generally boots really quickly, so you can always just save your work and turn it off. Avoiding hibernation also helps the system run more smoothly.

AHCI and TRIM commands:

AHCI, which stands for “advanced host controller interface,” allows the operating system to access the storage faster and use some advanced functions. One of these functions is the TRIM command, which allows a supported operating system to actively inform the SSD which blocks of data are no longer in use and can be wiped. This helps the drive work more efficiently, reduce the effect of Write Amplification and ultimately leads to faster performance and a longer lifespan.

Generally, both AHCI and TRIM are enabled by default. You can check and change the former in the computer’s BIOS setting. It varies depending on your computer, but with most systems you can enter the BIOS by tapping the Delete or F2 key as the computer boots up. Here, look for the storage section and change the value of “Configure SATA as” to “AHCI” (if it’s not already AHCI). It’s better to do this before you install the operating system, otherwise you’ll need to install the storage drivers first before changing the value. Note that if you use two SSDs in a RAID configuration, then the RAID value (rather than AHCI) should be selected. Also if your computer doesn’t have option for RAID or AHCI, but only IDE, then it’s too old — time to shop for a new computer.

You can determine if TRIM is working by running elevated Windows Powershell as described above in the hibernation section, then executing this command:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If the command returns “DisableDeleteNotify = 0”, then TRIM is running. If not, you can turn it on by executing:

fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0

If your Mac comes with an SSD, then TRIM is always enabled. However, if you install your own SSD on a Mac, make sure you follow this How-to post to enable TRIM.

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Superfetch: This is a technology, first introduced in Windows Vista, that allows Windows to more efficiently manage system memory and preload frequently accessed data and applications into the memory for faster performance. However, this process requires Superfetch’s cache to be written on the drive and updated regularly, which increases the amount of writing to the drive.

If your computer uses a hard drive, Superfetch is useful. For an SSD, however, it’s not necessary and only wastes the drive’s P/E cycles.

To disable Superfetch, run the Windows Powershell as mentioned above and execute the services.msc command. This will open the Services utility. Next, on the list, look for Superfetch, then double-click it and disable it.

Page File (aka virtual memory): In OSes such as Windows 10, the Page File is like a system memory wannabe. In a nutshell, the Page File is the amount of storage space on an internal storage device that the OS reserves for use when an application requires more physical memory (RAM) than the computer is equipped with.

The Page File’s size tends to change dynamically, resulting in frequent writing to the drive, which, again, is not good for an SSD. So if you use a computer with 8GB of RAM or more, and you generally don’t run lots of concurrent programs, it might be a good idea to turn off Page File completely. However, the best practice is to set it at a fixed size recommended by the system. Or if you’re on a desktop with an SSD as its primary drive and a secondary hard drive, it’s best to move the Page File to the hard drive and disable it on the SSD.

To change the setting of Windows 10’s Page File, follow these steps:

• Right-click on Windows’ Start button
• Select System (then, if you’re running Windows 10 1703, click on System info)
• Click on Advanced System Settings
• Choose Advanced tab
• Click on the top Settings… button (under the Performance section)
• Choose Advanced tab
• Click on Change
• Uncheck the box that reads “Automatically mange paging file size for all drives”
• Check the Custom size radio button
• Enter the Initial size and Maximum size with the value of the number following the Recommended: at the bottom of the window
• Click on the OK buttons to close the Windows, and choose to Restart the computer.

Move the default location of a frequently written folder to a different drive: This only applies to computers (most likely desktops) with a secondary internal hard drive. In this case it’s a good idea to move the default location of folders that are often written to that drive.

If it’s one of the folders within your profile on a Windows computer — Downloads, Documents, Pictures and so on — you can follow these steps to move it to a new location.

With other folders, you might need to change the default location in the settings/preferences of the software.

Don’t stress

That’s it. After all that, you can rest assured that you’ve done nearly all that can be done to make your SSD work at its most optimal and last as long as possible. Again, note that these are just precautions; if you simply use an SSD the way you do a hard drive, chances are it will still last for a very long time. The latest operating systems all come equipped with SSD-friendly settings that help reduce unnecessary writing. So for most of us, there’s not much to worry about.

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Apple’s new iPad is cheaper, faster and brighter

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If you’re in the market for a new 9.7-inch iPad, Staples has a deal. From now until April 8 you can get any version of the new tablet with a 10 percent discount. That means the 32GB version will cost $299 instead of $329 and the 128GB version will go for $399 instead of $429.

The new updated iPad has faster performance and a brighter screen than the previous model, and its regular price is very competitive, so this is a great deal. It seems Staples is the only place offering this discount; the tablet still goes for the original price at Apple and Best Buy.

Apple iPad (2017)

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The US Federal Aviation Administration on Friday announced airspace restrictions aimed at drones, banning any unauthorized unmanned vehicles from flying over 133 military facilities. The ban kicks in on April 14.

FAA said the restrictions are based on authority granted to it under Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations (14 CFR) § 99.7:

“U.S. military facilities are vital to the nation’s security. The FAA and the Department of Defense have agreed to restrict drone flights up to 400 feet within the lateral boundaries of these 133 facilities. The restrictions will be effective April 14, 2017.”

Drone owners can find out about these restricted facilities via an interactive online map or the FAA’s B4UFLY mobile app, which will be updated with the new rules in the next 60 days.

Operators who violate the airspace restrictions may be subject to enforcement action, including potential civil penalties and criminal charges. For more information, go to FAA’s UAS website.

The FAA said it’s considering additional requests from federal security and intelligence agencies.

Editor’s note (June 14, 2017): Updated for clarity.

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3 things to consider when buying storage devices

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Editors’ note: This article is frequently updated to reflect changes in technology and in the marketplace.

The computing world runs on information, and handling it is crucial. So it’s important that you select the best storage device to not only hold your data, but also distribute it. In this guide, I’ll explain the basics of storage and list the features that you should consider when shopping. If you’re ready to head to the store right now, though, I’ve also listed my top picks.

Power users hoping to get the most out of a home storage system should consider a network-attached storage (NAS) server such as a four- or five-bay NAS server from Synology, QNAP, Asus, Netgear, Western Digital or Seagate. Alternatively, if you want your new computer to run at its top speed, a solid-state drive (SSD) such as the Samsung 850 Pro or the Toshiba OCZ VX500, or an M.2 drive (if your computer supports it) will make that happen. But if you have an older machine and budget is an issue, there are more affordable SSDs, like the Samsung SSD 850 Evo or the OCZ Trion.

Want more SSD options? Check out this list.

If you just want to boost your laptop’s storage space or find a quick way to back up your data, an affordable portable drive such as the WD My Passport Ultra or the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim will do the trick. Again, more excellent portable storage drives can be found on this list.

There are three main areas you should consider when picking a storage device: performance, capacity and data safety. I’ll explain them briefly here. After you’re finished, I encourage you to check out this article for an even deeper dive into the world of storage.

Performance

Storage performance refers to the speed at which data transfers within a device or from one device to another. Currently, the speed of a single consumer-grade internal drive is largely defined by the Serial ATA interface standard (SATA). This determines how fast internal drives connect to a host (such as a personal computer or a server) or to one another. There are three generations of SATA — the latest and most popular, SATA 3, caps at 6 gigabits per second (about 770 megabytes per second). The earlier SATA 1 (largely obsolete) and SATA 2 standards cap data speeds at 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps, respectively.

So what do those data speeds mean in the real world?

Consider this: At top speed, a SATA 3 drive can transfer a CD’s worth of data (about 700MB) in less than a second. The actual speed of a hard drive may be slower because of mechanical limitations and overheads, but that should give you an idea of what’s possible. A hard drive’s real-world speed tends to be around one-tenth of the SATA 3 standard. SSDs, on the other hand, offer speeds much closer to the SATA 3 ceiling. Most existing internal drives and host devices (such as computers) now support SATA 3, and are backward-compatible with previous revisions of SATA.

Since 2015, there’s been a new standard called M.2, which is only available for SSDs. M.2 allows the storage device to connect to a computer via PCI express (the type of connection once used only to connect a video card to a motherboard) and is therefore much faster than SATA. Currently, only high-end desktop motherboards support M.2. These tend to come with two slots. Some ultracompact laptops also have an M.2 slot instead of SATA. Just about the size of a stick of system memory, an M.2 SSD is much more compact than a regular SSD. It’s also much faster and can deliver the same amount of storage space. In the future, M.2 is expected to replace regular SATA drives completely.

Since internal drives are used in most other types of storage devices, including external drives and network storage, the SATA standard is the common denominator of storage performance. In other words, a single-volume storage device — one that has only one internal drive inside — can be as fast as 6Gbps. In multiple-volume setups, there are techniques that aggregate the speed of each individual drive into a faster combined data speed, but I’ll discuss that in more detail in the RAID section below.

Capacity

Capacity is the amount of data that a storage device can handle. Generally, we measure the total capacity of a drive or a storage system in gigabytes. On average, 1GB can hold about 500 iPhone photos or about 200 iTunes songs.

Currently, the highest-capacity 3.5-inch (desktop) internal hard drive can hold up to 10 terabytes (TB) or roughly 10,000GB. On laptops, the top hard drives as well as SSDs can offer up to 2TB.

While a single-volume storage device’s capacity will max out at some point, there are techniques that make it possible to combine several drives to offer dozens of TBs and even more. I’ll discuss that in more detail as well in the RAID section below.

Data safety

The safety of your data depends on the durability of the drive on which it’s stored. And for single drives, you have to consider both the drive’s quality and how you’ll use it.

Generally, hard drives are more susceptible to shocks, vibration, heat and moisture than SSDs. Durability isn’t a big issue for a desktop since you won’t be moving your computer very often (one hopes). For a laptop, however, I’d recommend an SSD or a hard drive that’s designed to withstand falls and other sudden movement.

When it comes to portable drives, you can opt for a product that comes with layers of physical protection, such as the Glyph Blackbox Plus or the G-Tech G-Drive ev ATC. These drives are generally great for people working in rough environments.

But even when you’ve chosen the optimal drive for your needs, you mustn’t forget to use backup, redundancy or both. Not even the best drive is designed to last forever — and there’s no guarantee against failure, loss or theft.

The easiest way to back up your drive is to regularly put copies of your data on multiple storage devices. Most external drives come with automatic backup or sync software for Windows. Mac users, on the other hand, can take advantage of Apple‘s Time Machine feature. All external drives work with both Windows and Macs, as long as they’re formatted in the right file system: NTFS for Windows or HFS+ for Macs. The reformatting takes just a few seconds. If you’re on a budget or want to quickly find the best portable storage system, here’s our list of top portable drives.

But be warned — this process isn’t foolproof yet. Besides taking time, backing up your drive can leave small windows in which data may be lost. That’s why for professional and real-time data protection, you should consider redundancy.

RAID

The most common approach to data redundancy is RAID, which stands for “redundant array of independent disks.” RAID requires that you use two internal drives or more, and depending on the setup, a RAID configuration can offer faster speeds, more storage space or both. Just note that standard RAIDs generally require drives of the same capacity. Here are the three most common RAID setups.

RAID 1: Also called mirroring, RAID 1 requires at least two internal drives. In this setup, data writes identically to both drives simultaneously, resulting in a mirrored set. What’s more, a RAID 1 setup continues to operate safely even if only one drive is functioning (thus allowing you to replace a failed drive on the fly). The drawback of RAID 1 is that no matter how many drives you use, you get the capacity of only one. RAID 1 also suffers from slower writing speeds.

RAID 0: Like RAID 1, RAID 0 requires at least two internal drives. Unlike RAID 1, however, it combines the capacity of the drives into a single volume while delivering maximum bandwidth. The only catch is that if one drive dies, you lose information on all devices. So while more drives in a RAID 0 setup means higher bandwidth and capacity, there’s also a greater risk of data loss. Generally, RAID 0 is used mostly for dual-drive storage setups. And should you choose RAID 0, backup is a must. RAID 0 is the only RAID setup that doesn’t provide data protection.

For a storage device that uses four internal drives, you can use a RAID 10 setup, which is the combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0, for both performance and data safety.

RAID 5: This setup requires at least three internal drives, but it distributes data on all drives. Though a single-drive failure won’t result in the loss of any data, performance will suffer until you replace the broken device. Still, because it balances storage space (you lose the capacity of only one drive in the RAID), performance and data safety, RAID 5 is the preferred setup.

RAID 6: This array is similar to RAID 5, but now the array can survive the case that two of its internal drive fails at the same time. RAID 6 is generally used in storage devices that have 5 internal drives or more. In a RAID 6, you lose the capacity of two internal drives.

Most RAID-capable storage devices come with the RAID setup pre-configured, so you don’t need to set that up yourself.

Now that you’ve learned how to balance performance, capacity and data safety, let’s consider the three main types of storage devices: internal drives, external drives and network-attached storage (NAS) servers.

Internal drives

Though they share the same SATA interface, the performance of internal drives can vary sharply. Generally, hard drives are much slower than SSDs, but SSDs are much more expensive than hard drives, gigabyte for gigabyte.

That said, if you’re looking to upgrade your system’s main drive — the one that hosts the operating system — it’s best to get an SSD. You can get an SSD with a capacity of 256GB (currently costing around $150 or less), which is enough for a host drive. You can always add more storage with an external drive or, in the case of a desktop, another regular secondary hard drive.

Though not all SSDs offer the same performance, the differences are minimal. To make it easier for you to choose, here’s our list of the best internal drives.

External drives

External storage devices are basically one or more internal drives put together inside an enclosure and connected to a computer using a peripheral connection.

There are four main peripheral connection types: USB, Thunderbolt, FireWire and eSATA. Most, if not all, new external drives now use just USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt or both. There are good reasons why.

USB 3.0 offers a cap speed of 5Gbps and is backward-compatible with USB 2.0. Thunderbolt caps at 10Gbps (or 20Gbps with Thunderbolt 2.0), and you can daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt drives together without degrading the bandwidth. Thunderbolt also makes RAID possible when you connect multiple single-volume drives of the same capacity. Note that more computers support USB 3.0 than Thunderbolt, especially among PCs. All existing computers support USB 2.0, which also works with USB 3.0 drives (though at USB 2.0 data speeds).

Generally, speed is not the most important factor for non-Thunderbolt external drives. That may seem counterintuitive, but the reason is that the USB 3.0 connectivity standard, which is the fastest among all non-Thunderbolt standards, is slower than the speed of SATA 3 internal drives.

Capacity, however, is a bigger issue. USB external drives are the most affordable external storage devices on the market, and they come with a wide range of capacities to fit your budget. Make sure to get a drive that offers at least the same capacity as your computer. Check out our list of best external drives for more information.

There’s no difference in terms of performance between bus-powered (a data cable is also used to draw power) and non-bus-powered (a separate power adapter is required) external drives. Generally, only single-volume external drives that are based on a laptop 2.5-inch internal drive can be bus-powered, and these drives offer around 2TB of storage space. Non-bus-powered external storage devices mostly use 3.5-inch internal drives and can combine multiple internal drives, so they can offer more storage space.

Currently, Thunderbolt storage devices are more popular for Macs, and unlike other external drives, deliver very fast performance. They are significantly more expensive than USB 3.0 drives with prices fluctuating a great deal depending on the number of internal drives you use. Here’s our list of the top Thunderbolt drives.

Network-attached storage (NAS) devices

A NAS device (aka NAS server) is very similar to an external drive. But instead of connecting to a computer directly, it connects to a network and offers storage space to all devices on the network at the same time.

As you might imagine, NAS servers are ideal for sharing a large amount of data between devices. Besides storage, NAS servers offer many more features, like being capable of streaming digital content to network players, downloading files, backing up files from a network computer and sharing data over the internet.

If you’re in the market for a NAS server, you should focus on the capacities of the internal drives used. Also, it’s a good idea to get hard drives that use less energy and are designed to work 24-7 since NAS servers are generally left on all the time.

Connection types

A final consideration when purchasing a storage device is the connection. Currently, it all comes down to USB vs. Thunderbolt, since other types are largely obsolete. Obviously you’ll want to get a drive that can work with your computer. So if your machine has a Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 port (as most Macs do) then you’ll want to get a Thunderbolt drive. On the other hand, since most computers have at least one USB port, getting a USB-based drive is a safe bet. Some portable drives support both Thunderbolt and USB.

However, if you want your drive to be future-proof — meaning it will not only work with your current computer, but also the computer you’ll buy a year or three from now — then you need one with a USB-C port. A USB-C portable drive will work with all existing computers when you use a USB-C-to-USB-A cable. If you have a computer that has a USB-C port, such as the MacBook, you can connect a USB-C drive to it by using a regular USB-C-to-USB-C cable.

Currently, all new computers with Thunderbolt will also support USB-C. This is because the latest version of Thunderbolt 3 has moved to use the same port type and cable as those of USB-C. In other words, every Thunderbolt 3 port will also function as a normal USB-C port and every Thunderbolt 3 cable will also work as a USB-C cable.

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