Western Digital

Western Digital

If you're having computer storage problems, then you'll want to opt for a high-capacity WD drive. These storage devices can hold massive amounts of data, with some internal desktop hard drives exceeding 4TB of space. This should give you plenty of room for all of your photos, game files, and media.

SATA hard drives come in the 3.5-inch size for desktop computers, though you'll also be able to use 2.5-inch hard drives in the larger bays. While most devices can fit fairly thick drives, there are several extremely thin storage devices that you may wish to use with game consoles or smaller netbook computers that can't mount thicker hard drives.

Western Digital Passport drives come with the following software programs on them along with instructions on how to download additional copies from the internet for other platforms:

• Acronis True Image
• WD Access for Windows & Mac
• Arkeia WD Network Backup
• Hard Drive SmartWare
• WD Universal Firmware Updater

While most users won't necessarily care about how fast the signaling rate of their USB port is, this is a useful measurement for gamers and those who are moving tons of files to an external volume. If you connect a Western Digital drive to USB 2.0 ports, then you should see around 280 megabits pass through the USB cable every second. Using USB 3.0 ports should result in speeds somewhere around four gigabits passing along the cable each second. These USB speeds should be more than sufficient for those who want to run demanding games off of a volume mounted on an external hard drive.

Since they use the standard USB adapter, these external hard drives are hardware-compatible with any device that can mount a volume over a serial bus. If you want to be able to trade files between many different devices, then you'll need to reformat it. WD made this, since their own software supports the MS-DOS FAT32 file structure that many mobile devices and game consoles read. These disks support FAT32 partitions greater than 32 gigabytes even when the local system software doesn't.

Electromechanical WD disks support defragmentation if you've set them up with a file system that requires it, like VFAT or NTFS. You won't have to if you're using a certified Unix file system, but these disks are configured so that these devices don't suffer any physical degradation. This kind of utility may be a good idea if you've been running online apps or games off the disk that create a number of different files.