Then, all the names changed: not once, but twice. And, just in case this was all too easy for you, the USB standards body has also dreamt up the term “SuperSpeed” and added that into the mix too.

When the drive isn't available on your computer, it could also be a driver issue. You can troubleshoot and fix this problem in at least two ways. You can install the most up-to-date driver available, or you can reinstall the same driver to see if it helps the computer detect the drive. In general, how much torture a given drive can take varies according to the nature of its enclosure. Some will let you drive a car over them. Others might be designed to handle just a short fall off a desk, and not much more. The drive is a shade expensive, and the integrated carrying loop is too big to easily fit on a standard keychain.Otherwise, this is an excellent storage device that's ideal for heavy everyday use. Do you care more about speed, capacity, or price? If it’s the first, SSDs store data in flash memory rather than on spinning platters the way traditional hard drives do and thus operate a whole lot faster. The interface can also make a difference; Thunderbolt 3 will be a lot faster than USB, for example. Remember: no matter how fast the port is, if the hard disk or SSD within the drive can’t run fast enough, you won’t see any benefits. The same goes if your computer doesn’t support that connection speed; you’d be surprised how few desktops and laptops have even a single USB 3.2 gen 2×2 port.

Whether you’re running out of storage space or in need of a fast backup, these speedy HDDs and SSDs will give you what you need

A few drives feature secondary enclosures that are removable, adding another layer of protection between the drive and the casing. These are typically sealed with O-rings all the way around, allowing the drive inside extra moisture protection. In other cases, the removable element might just be a rubber or silicone wrapper around an outer metal or plastic external-drive casing. If Windows 10 doesn't detect the drive correctly, and it appears in Disk Management with the Unreadable status, you're experiencing read and write errors, corruption, or hardware failure. You can trust LaCie to bring a little style to storage, and its latest Mobile Drive is another distinctive effort, with an angular, all-aluminium design enhanced by diamond-cut edges and a choice of space grey and moon silver MacBook-matching finishes. But while the looks are important, they’re not all this drive has to rely on. If all else fails and you possess the technical know-how, you can triage your hardware by removing it from its enclosure and hooking it up to a computer the old-fashioned way. If anything, this will allow you to copy its contents to another drive, or upload it to the cloud, in case it fails completely. This only applies to external hard disks or SSDs; it won't work with thumb drives.

When you're dealing with an external platter-based hard drive, it makes little difference which USB interface you get, as long as it works with your PC; the speed of a hard drive won't challenge any of the modern USB 3.x flavors. Bottom line, when looking at rugged drives with a USB interface, you just need to be sure your PC or Mac has aphysically compatibleUSB port—that is, can you simply plug it in, and does the drive say it works with PCs, Macs, or both? This physical compatibility is what matters most, as a USB device will dial down to the slower speed of the two elements in play (the host system or the drive). For more helpful articles, coverage, and answers to common questions about Windows 10, visit the following resources: The Extreme Portable SSD comes pre-formatted as an exFAT device which means that it can work on Windows and Mac out of the box. Reformattingit to NTFS will limit compatibility to Windows but will enable TRIM which will improve the longevity of the drive. Windows 10 only recognizes drives using a supported file system (NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, or ReFS). If you're connecting a drive formatted using a different OS (macOS or Linux) with an unsupported file system, it won't appear on your computer. In this case, the solution is to format the drive using a supported file system.

We hooked up each external hard drive to a current-generation Dell XPS 17 laptop, using the best connection interface available to that drive, always in the same port, to minimize performance differentials.