With movies and music files dominating the memory of my desktop and laptops, I need to find a cheap external hard drive to transfer some of my files. Even those who are not a digital media fan, they too need an external drive to back up their files and protect important photos and documents. Since these external hard drives vary in qualities and storage capacity, you should be very careful in finding the right external hard drive.

Choose High Quality Cheap External Hard Drive

Since your files are very important, you need to make sure that you are not entrusting its future on a low quality storage device. Sacrificing quality for price is not a good thing to do. Although there are lots of external hard drives which cost less than others but are quite decent in quality and are somewhat reliable, most of these cheap drives cost less for a reason. I too had a hard time finding the external hard drive that is priced fairly. To make the selection easier, I found that it is best to check out some online user reviews, so you will not get stuck with a poor quality hard drive. It is best to purchase the item from a reliable retailer that offers a reasonable return policy.

The Factors Affecting The Price Of The External Hard Drive

The two factors that affect the cost of these external hard drives are the amount of space and the features. The higher the amount of memory you need the higher cost will be. If you don’t require a huge storage device, you can choose a 250GB external drive from trusted brands for less than $50. When new models are released, check out the older models since they are usually offered at discounted price. This will help you save some money. In case you require more data storage, it is best to compare different brands to determine if the different set of features will provide savings. If in case you don’t require a FireWire connection, you can purchase one which does not have this feature since it is much cheaper. The 5400 RPM kind is much cheaper as compared to the 7200 RPM hard drives but it is slower in performance.

Determining Quality Of Cheap External Hard Drive

What is cheap for me might be overpriced to others, so it is best that one should set a realistic budget when buying external hard drives. Generally, the cheapest drives are those that are clunky, poorly made, huge or outdated. The low-quality device may have weak components and might not write data consistently and most of the time, it fails without a warning.

The Files You Need To Store

Since I travel a lot, I need to find a hard drive that I could bring along easily anywhere I go. I think a mini-hard drive or its portable model is enough to carry around all my media and other important files. However, this is not recommended to those who require an external hard drive to store data or need more storage at home; for them, a larger yet cheap external hard drive would do.