If you purchase the hard drive from a reputable brand, the probability of a long lifespan is higher, and so is its price. The durability of your hard drive depends on the price, brand, quality, type, and environment. While some drives are backed by a weather-proof coating or a rugged surface, others have glass bearings and other materials impuissant to externalities. If you are planning to move with enormous data in your pocket, make sure to purchase a hard-wearing drive that is less vulnerable to external abrasions. What are things to keep in mind while buying a 2tb external hard drive? Portability Below, we have also shed light on a few factors that you should consider before making a final decision to choose the best 2TB external hard drive. The above review guide has been crafted with immense care as we realize that your data and its security take precedence over everything else. We evaluated a myriad of hard drives in the market and found the top 2TB external hard drives that can suffice your requirements. Just as QLC wouldn’t make the cut for a 5G provider looking for storage options for their base stations, SLC solutions would be overkill for the average consumer.Best 2TB External Hard Drives Buying Guideĭata is power, and tons of power without sufficient storage is simply useless. It is important to remember that NAND cells aren’t the only element that has an effect on flash performance, things like the interface being used, over-provisioning (dedicating a portion of the available storage to the controller), SLC caching, controller, inclusion of DRAM, among others also play an important role.Īs most purchases, in the end it all boils down the consumer and its specific needs. Nowadays, most consumers can gain access to the blazing fast speeds of SSDs at very low price points, with in some cases prices starting from well under $100 for nearly 1TB (e.g. These solutions contribute to the maintenance of good data integrity, however they do so at the cost of higher latency and lower random performance (usually measured in IOPS).ĭespite the drawbacks mentioned, the sizable reductions in terms of costs and an ever growing storage capacity make up for a fair trade off. With higher voltage comes higher temperatures, which facilitate a phenomenon called electron leakage and might lead to data corruption.įurthermore, every bit added to the cells increases the need for comprehensive error correction technologies. This is a surefire way to reduce costs and increase capacity but it has considerably negative effects on performance, reliability and endurance, the latter being super important if you want to use your drives for Chia farming or as NAS drives.Įach additional bit makes it more time consuming to read and write from a cell, voltage needs also grow and so does power consumption. One way of reducing cost has been to increase the number of bits per cell. Solid state drives are still expensive because they are costly to produce and have to compete with other components for production lines. Among the best rugged hard drives out there, it comes with three layers of shock resistance, crush resistance for up to 1000lbs weight, and rain and dust resistance, making it the best companion for anyone who’s always out battling the elements.Īnthony Spence, Marketing Specialist at Silicon Power, answers this question Western Digital’s G-Technology brand is no stranger to ensuring that your data is kept safe, and G-Technology ArmorATD does so by offering several layers of physical protection.