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 ...

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 ...

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.

'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 ...