3TB External Hard Drive

External drive capacities have rocketed in the last couple of years and now a 3TB external hard drive is fairly common place. This size of drive is capable of backing up your entire computer and if done regularly, will prevent any disasters occuring if your internal drive fails. With such a large drive volume, copying and backing up data files can take quite a considerable length of time with the most common interface over the past few years, the USB 2 connection. However more and more drives are now appearing with the USB3.0 interface which is considerably faster, and this makes transferring to a 3TB external hard drive a much speedier process.

These drives typically come with included backup software which makes it very easy to make copies of your data. Backups can be scheduled to perform daily, weekly or any other specified time as well as being set to perform continuous backups so that your computer is never in danger of losing any data. There is also commerical backup software made by the likes of Acronis that will do the same job and can be easily combined with your 3TB external hard drive.

Why would you need such a large drive?

Many people now store their photos, video and music on their computers and these types of files can be very large. Uncompressed or cd quality audio for example will take up 10mb per stereo minute of disk space so you can see that a five minute song will be 50mb in size. 10 songs and you have already used half a gigabyte of storage quite easily. Video files and in particular 1080 HD formats are even larger and with many people owning hd camcorders, transferring any footage to your computer will quickly eat up disk space. Having a 3TB external hard drive or even a 2TB external hard drive will allow you to transfer these files for additional storage and backup.

Additionally for further protection of your valuable files, you can now buy external drives that house two drives in the same enclosure. One drive continually clones the other drive so that if there is a failure to one of the drives, your data is still secure on the other. Another feature that is becoming more popular is cloud backup of your data which a number of manufacturers are offering when purchasing an external hard drive. This works well for relatively modest amounts of storage but because upload speeds are a lot slower than download speeds, when talking in terms of terabytes of data this is not really feasible.

Don’t make the mistake of being complacent about backing up your data. If a drive fails, data recovery can be an extremely expensive process running into hunderds of pounds and even then is not always successful. For a cost of just a small percentage of that figure, you can buy a 3TB external hard drive that will give you peace of mind and ensure that your precious files are safe and secure should any disaster occur.