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But modern ones are faster, more stylish, and often more durable than their counterparts from a few years ago. In an era when 50GB of iCloud storage is 99 cents per month, and trim, slim external SSDs are getting cheaper, external hard drives, based on spinning platter disks, might appear less essential than they once were. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Software.Unless your main system drive is an SSD, writing files to a superfast external disk or RAID array will be limited to the speed of the slowest device in the chain. The iMac’s HDD is the limiting factor here – when we retested from a RAM disk, the LaCie backed up the 5GB folder in a mere 26 seconds. Backing up a 5GB folder of photos took 1min 32secs from the iMac’s HDD, only a little quicker than with the LaCie Rugged drive. Loading our test Crysis level took only 34 seconds – half as long as with the HDD – while opening 1GB of photos in Photoshop was seven seconds faster, taking only 12 seconds. We tested Thunderbolt with LaCie’s Thunderbolt-equipped Little Big Disk, which features two 120GB SSDs in a striped RAID0 array.įor large files, Thunderbolt posted read speeds four times faster than what it managed with the HDD, with significant improvement in small-file transfer speeds, too. If speed is of the essence, it might be worth considering an external drive that uses single or multiple SSDs. While USB 3’s theoretical 4.8Gbits/sec bandwidth translates into a potential throughput of 612MB/sec, Thunderbolt’s claimed 10Gbits/sec promises transfer speeds of up to 1,280MB/sec – way beyond the capability of even the fastest SSDs. Very few devices are capable of pushing USB 3 or Thunderbolt to their limits. Backing up a 5GB folder filled with a mixture of file sizes took more than four minutes over USB 2 switching to USB 3 or Thunderbolt slashed that to less than two minutes. Opening images in Photoshop from the external drive took half the time with USB 3 or Thunderbolt, with 1GB of images loading in only 19 seconds – via USB 2, we were kept waiting for 46 seconds. In our real-world tests, the benefits of the faster interfaces remain obvious. Moving to a USB 3 or Thunderbolt connection almost tripled that figure: speeds increased to 116MB/sec – the maximum you can expect from a standard laptop HDD.

This was especially noticeable while reading and writing larger files: the LaCie achieved a maximum transfer speed of 42MB/sec.