For the most part, as long as the hard drive is relatively new, you should be fine. However, if you intend on using the drive heavily, as in the case of an external storage device for a game ...

A hard drive or solid state drive (SSD) that resides outside the computer's case, typically connecting via USB or eSATA. A USB flash drive is also external storage. See portable drive and USB drive.

The only case with hard drives where the USB standard matters much is if you connect a drive to an old-style, low-bandwidth USB 2.0 port, which is better reserved for items like keyboards and mice.

Selecting the right external hard drive is equally important for protecting your priceless raw data, and for providing easy ...

And, of course, you should always have an external drive available for making Time Machine backups in case ... Hard drives are slower than SSDs, but if you need lots of storage for your important ...

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources ...

It wasn't all that long ago when external hard drives used ... and offer masses of storage for very little money. The WD My Passport is the best overall external HDD drive we've tested so far ...

Owning one of the best external hard drives is a great way to back up your data or simply give you more storage space for your astrophotography work. They are also great to give as gifts to ...