For those of you who need to back up a lot of stuff like me, it might make sense to carry a good portable hard drive.
In this review, I will review some of the best portable hard drives you can get with pros and cons.
First, for those of you who want the “fastest” transfer speeds for backups, you will want a firewire connection to your PC or Mac. Most Macs support firewire while it will depend for PCs. (You can get a firewire card too by the way.)
For Mac users and PC users who must have the “fastest”, the LaCie Rugged 500GB portable hard drive is a must as it supports up to 800Mbps transfer speed using Firewire 800. Also the Lacie supports Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 if you happened to be on the road with a laptop that doesn’t have a firewire.
For portability, speed, and stability, the LaCie Rugged 500GB portable hard drive proves to be the best choice.
Now if you don’t need Firewire and you want to spend a little less, the best choice I think would be the Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB portable hard drive. For about $100, you can have a good USB 2.0 with up to 480Mbps transfer speeds. The Seagate portable harddrive is just 0.5 inch thin and weights 5.6 ounces.
Also, you can get the Seagate Free Agent Hard Drive Dock ($14.95) so you can dock your hard drive easily without fussing with cable and clutter.
The Toshiba 500GB portable hard drive is a another great choice. The specs are practically same for this Toshiba as others. $90.40 on Amazon
Western Digital has been making quite a run at portable hard drives with their Passport series. My sister has one of these and of course, these are great too. 500GB $140.02 on Amazon The Passport also comes in 4 flavors of color. If color is of your concern, perhaps the Passport portable hard drives will work for you.
Well, there you have it. Depending on what you need, any of these portable hard drives may work for you. I think 500GB is enough for most people but if you need larger external hard drives, they certainly won’t be “portable” anymore, we will have to cover that in another review.
Also remember there’s a bunch of great online back-up solutions if your data isn’t super-classified, try iDrive, Mozy, and there’s a bunch others. One more thing, if you need to back up photos/videos, try Google Picasa, something I use for my own photos/videos.
Having physical backups are good except if you lose them, they are not so great backups as you lose your data completely. I try to have both types of backups, perhaps that is the best way.
