External hard drive: How to choose it?

Adding an external hard drive or SSD to your setup has never been so affordable. Our selection presents our favorite models to add Go and even To to your installation.

 extend the storage of your laptop computer. Your console, or to play your videos from a smart TV or an internet box. An external hard drive is a simple and increasingly affordable solution. External hard drives are small, thin, often self-powered via the USB port. and even small models are now reaching capacities that are comparable to “large” models. Enough to store your movies, music, photos and important files easily and inexpensively on a device that you can take with you everywhere.

Manufacturers like Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba or Maxtor allow you to acquire a 1TB or even 4TB external hard drive for prices below 100 euros. If you prefer speed over capacity, and your PC or Mac has a USB-C port, external SSDs are becoming more democratic and allow you to access your data even faster on an accessory that fits in your pocket. In short, there is no shortage of options to take advantage of more capacity for your content and your games, as shown by the products we have selected in our selection!

our selection

  • Samsung T5 500 GB external hard drive 
  • Kesu USB-C 250 GB drive
  • Kesu 500 GB drive
  • Toshiba Canvio Basics 1TB Drive
  • Western Digital WD 1TB External Drive
  • Western Digital My 2TB External Hard Drive
  • Maxtor M3 4TB external hard drive
  • LaCie Mobile Drive 2 TB Drive
  • Seagate Expansion 4TB drive
  • Western Digital My Cloud 4TB external drive
  • ow to format a drive?

How to format a drive depends on your operating system. In Windows 10, there are several ways to format your drive. The easiest way is to go to Windows Explorer, then select “This PC” in the tree structure on the left. You should see your external drive appear in the main window. Right-click on the disc and choose Format from the menu that appears. Then choose the format: NTFS if you only intend to use your disk under Windows or FAT32 if you wish to use it also on a Mac.

On macOS, launch Disk Utility which you can easily find by pressing Cmd + Space then searching for “Disk Utility” in Spotlight. In Disk Utility, you see the list of connected disks. Choose your external drive then in the toolbar at the top of the Disk Utility window, choose Erase. If you only want to use your external drive on a Mac, choose the “Mac OS Extended” format. To use it with a Mac and a PC, choose “ExFat”.

How to partition a hard drive?

To partition a hard drive in Windows, launch the Disk Management tool. You will find it by right-clicking on the Start menu button at the bottom left of your screen. From the menu, choose Disk Management. In the tool you can shrink or extend an existing partition and create a new partition. On macOS, launch Disk Utility by searching for it on Spotlight. Choose your drive then in the toolbar at the top of the Disk Utility window, choose Partition.

How to clone an external hard drive?

Several software programs exist to exactly clone a hard drive. On Windows, Acronis TrueImage is a reference that allows you to create an exact image of your disk. On MacOS, we can recommend Super Duper.

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