USB Type-A You won’t find this familiar rectangular port on any drive, but you will still find it on plenty of PCs and laptops as well as the male version on the other end of most Type-B and Type-C adapter cables. What is carried over the wires varies greatly: USB 2.0 High Speed (480Mbps) to USB 3.2 SuperSpeed 20Gbps, as well as USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 and any combination of them. Keep in mind that Type-C refers only to the connector itself. It’s small, easy to insert, and you don’t have to worry about which side faces up as with Type-A. USB Type-C or simply Type-C is the latest USB connector and the one the world is standardizing on. It supports speeds up to 5Gbps and cables are generally Type-A on the PC side. Type B ports are becoming rare, though you might find one on older 5.25-inch enclosures, printers, and scanners. USB 3 Type-B is the larger, squarer version of USB 3.0 Micro B. It’ll do 5Gbps and is fine for hard drives and SATA (internally) SSDs. Micro-B cables are generally Type-A on the PC end. It’s actually the same Micro USB port used on your phone, but with more data lines to hit USB 3.0 speeds. USB 3 Micro-B - This wider, flatter port is still very common on many lower-cost portable and desktop external hard drives. Here’s the list of connectors you might see on your drive: PortsĮxternal drives come with a variety of ports, though they’re gradually (and thankfully) consolidating on the orientation-agnostic Type-C connector. The bottom drive features USB-C or USB Type C. The Orange drive features both a SuperSpeed Micro B and Thunderbolt 2 (mini DisplayPort connector). The second drive features the connector that replaced it: Micro B SuperSpeed. The top drive uses the older, slower Mini-USB interface. Pure Thunderbolt external SSDs can be even pricier, as they’re almost all sold by Mac-oriented boutique vendors such as OWC and Sabrent. The G40 is pricey at $160 for 1TB, but a fantastic drive for those who can afford it. That said, there are dual Thunderbolt/USB SSDs available such as the Sandisk Pro-G40. The key negatives are the premium pricing and a general lack of compatibility with the far more popular USB.

Thunderbolt 3 and the newer Thunderbolt 4 (almost exactly the same thing with stricter implementation requirements) are the highest-performing interfaces for external storage. Although far faster than 5/10Gbps, there still aren’t a lot of USB 20Gbps/USB4 ports out there. A 10Gbps Samsung T7 Shield can be had for $80 in a 1TB capacity.įaster USB 20Gbps (Gen 2×2) basically doubles speed but moves you into a higher-price bracket, with the Seagate Firecuda Gaming SSD costing $100 for only 500GB of storage. USB 10Gbps is fast enough for most users, and getting cheaper by the week. Where SuperSpeed 10Gbps/20Gbps, USB4, or Thunderbolt are of value is with the aforementioned RAID hard drive setups, or more likely-an SSD.

Because of that, you’ll never see one rated higher. No hard drive, unless combined with other drives in RAID 0 or above, can saturate even the 5Gbps interface (roughly 500MBps real-world after overhead). For the sake of brevity (and our sanity), we generally shorten those to, for example, USB 10Gbps, 10Gbps USB, 10Gbps etc.Īll USB hard drives use a slower standard, typically USB 5Gbps. The USB Forum has changed its nomenclature to indicate throughput speed-SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps (formerly USB 3.x gen 1), SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps (formerly USB 3.x gen 2), and SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps (formerly USB 3.2 2×2). Ignore the version number (3.x) and look for the speed. However, USB comes in many speeds: 5Gbps, 10Gbps, 20GBps, and-eventually with USB4-40Gbps as with Thunderbolt 3/4. The vast majority of external drives today are USB drives. Then again, if you really want rugged–go the SSD route. The latter is designed to take bumps in a laptop, even when powered up. While a desktop hard drive (read 3.5-inch) provides far more capacity (up to 26TB currently if you’re a data center), it also requires a power cable, weighs more, and generally won’t be as shock resistant as a portable 2.5-inch hard drive. I.e., the larger the capacity, the more backups over a longer period of time you can keep, or the more PCs you can back up to the same drive. If you have 1TB of storage in your PC, a 2TB drive allows you to make a full backup while keeping previous versions, as well as additional differential and incremental backups. So how much storage do you actually need? For backup, we recommend a drive that’s at least twice the capacity of the total amount of data residing on your PC’s internal storage. But it also means higher total cost, and not everyone needs maximum capacity. The best “value,” as you can see, typically means the most capacious hard drives. The worst value for an external hard drive is typically the lowest-capacity drive.

Seagate 5tb usb backup software