Home archive: 5 excellent 4 TB external HDDs

When Seagate brought back the Maxtor line of hard drives to the market, they changed their positioning slightly. Affordable price, maximum reliability and external simplicity became the new credo. So the case of Maxtor M3 is made of strong plastic, in which the front side is matte with a small edging, and the back is rougher, so it does not slip on the surface of the table or in the hands. The front side has an ornate, tile-like pattern that adds a twist to the look. Outwardly, the disc looks quite restrained, not without originality.

The connection to the computer is via a USB version 3 port, which is backwards compatible with older USB versions. Inside the case is a 4 TB HDD of its own production with a rotation speed of 5400 rpm and quite standard reading and writing indicators. In the Crystaldiskmark test, the drive showed the same 118 MB / s in both directions when linearly copying files of 4 - 6 GB and expectedly sank several times when it came to more massive files - an archive with Red Dead Redemption 2 for more than 100 gigabytes and dulogies The Avengers in 4K. All this once again leads us to the obvious conclusion that modern HDDs have accelerated to the maximum and hit their ceiling, so it makes little sense to choose a hard drive based on its speed performance. In this regard, all models are plus or minus equal, and the design, additional functions and how convenient and useful the software comes with it play a decisive role.

The delivery package with Maxtor is ascetic and fully corresponds to its price. It includes the essentials: a disk, a connection cable, an instruction manual with Russian-language localization, and a warranty card. The Drive Manager programme is loaded directly onto the disk, consisting of three components, each of which is responsible for one thing: backup, data protection, and management / monitoring of the drive. There is nothing unusual in this package, except for the selectivity of AutoBackup, which makes an initial copy of the system or data array, and then simply updates it if any changes have been made. It turns out much faster than a full backup.

Seagate Basic fully justifies its name. This is an affordable, simple and at the same time high-quality external HDD for those who value more than additional features. The design here is for everyone. Seagate has been fussing with looks lately (look at the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra), but in this case they just made the gray box as simple and practical as possible with a minimum of identification marks. At the end there is only a small company logo and a miniature indicator light strip that glows when the drive is turned on and blinks while data is being copied. But no gloss and traces of the hands.

Inside the case, a hard drive of its own production with a volume of 4 TB and a spindle speed of 5400 rpm is hidden. In synthetic tests, the drive shows good speeds at 132 MB / s for both reading and writing. It is worth noting that even with a long load, such as creating backups or transferring a library of games and movies to a new computer, the hard drive remains moderately quiet. But with the temperature, everything is not so smooth, in tests we managed to warm it up to 56 ° C. Therefore, when transferring large amounts of data, it is advisable to lay it on its side so that hot air does not accumulate in the lower part of the case. Given this, it's even a little insulting that Seagate gives it only a year of warranty, against 2 - 3 years for competitors.

Included with the drive is nothing but instructions, like any normal external HDD, it is seen by a computer without installing additional drivers. However, on the official website you can download a couple of useful utilities that will greatly simplify life in the future. DiscWizard will help you properly format the drive to work correctly with your system, transfer the necessary data from another hard drive and set up a backup for the system. A small utility SeaTools helps with disk diagnostics.

When creating fantasy hard drives, there is nowhere to roam. This is not for you to write "Alice in Wonderland". Therefore, the guys from Western Digital would like to take a special bow for the fact that they are not as boring as their competitors. A couple of years ago, one of the brightest stars on the external hard drive market was the WD My Passport and Passport Portable models, which stood out for their catchy, non-trivial appearance and bold colors. And at the end of 2019, the company launched another interesting experiment called the P10 Game Drive on the market.

This is a solid and voluminous HDD, hidden in a strong plastic frame, strongly reminiscent of an ammo box. Just look at the huge bolts in the corners and the slots in the style of metal containers. Accordingly, it does not provide protection from bumps and falls (despite its formidable appearance), so be careful with it. The main buyers of the P10 Game Drive are PC boyars and owners of PS4/PS4 Pro and Xbox One consoles, who desperately lack the available memory to store their ever-growing collection of games on Steam or the PS Store. Considering how bloated modern games have become, even the 4 TB available doesn't seem like overkill. If we take 40 GB as the average volume of a modern game, then you just get a collection of a hundred toys. Although, no one forbids taking a smaller or larger option, the assortment also includes 2 and 5 TB models.

When connecting the WD P10 Game Drive to the console, you will have to spend several minutes on the initial setup, no extra gestures are required from the PC, the disc is picked up automatically. In terms of characteristics, the model fully justifies its not the lowest price tag: operating read and write speeds reach 140 MB / s and sag, not as fast as other external HDDs due to a capacious buffer. In work, he proved to be even better than the built-in PS4 Pro drive: loading a save in Assassin's Creed Odyssey took him 1 minute and 10 seconds, against a minute and 16 seconds for the built-in curling iron hard drive. Other open world games that take a long time to load also see a slight advantage of a few seconds. I also liked that during operation it behaves silently and practically does not heat up, and the rubber feet at the bottom dampen vibrations well and prevent it from scratching the table.

If Batman suddenly came to the electronics store with his Batcredit card, then he would come back with a nice box from A-Data, in which there would be an external HDD DashDrive Durable. And there are 2 reasons for this. The first is a solid appearance, which is somewhat reminiscent of that tank from The Dark Knight. The bristling black (there are also other colors) box seems to have been born to deal with any adversity and meets them with a smirk.

The second reason is a serious layer of armor. Serious, even by the standards of shock- resistant hard drives. The protective casing consists of three parts: a durable silicone outer bumper, inside of which is hidden a shock-absorbing frame that absorbs shock and vibration, and under them the last line of protection in the form of a durable plastic case that tenaciously holds the hard drive. As a result, the case was tested according to the military standard MIL-STD-810 and received an IPX7 certificate, that is, it is not afraid of drops from a meter height (A Data says that the drive withstood 26 drops from a height of 122 cm) and withstands a short immersion in water for a meter depth. The main thing is not to forget to close the ports with rubber plugs. Well, in general, it’s not worth specially subjecting the miniature mechanics of a hard drive to such torture.

Judging by the Crystaldiskmark benchmark data, a 4-terabyte HDD from Seagate(formerly Toshiba) is hidden inside the case with a speed of 5400 rpm and a 128 MB cache. In synthetic benchmarks, the drive averages 130MB/s sequential read and 123.7MB/s sequential write. There is nothing unusual here, these are close to the maximum figures for a third-generation USB HDD. Speaking of USB. Like many protected "outsiders" in the case there is a special mount for the cable. On the one hand, this is convenient, since it is always at hand, on the other hand, the cable is short and it is not very convenient to connect it to a computer that is somewhere under the table.

Photographers and cameramen love external drives from LaCie. They are stylish, high-quality, reliable and at the moment are picked up by a working MacBook. The only problem was transportation. Many people needed a reliable hard drive that could be thrown into a backpack and taken with them to filming, without worrying that someone would accidentally kick the backpack at work, the HDD would fall out of their pocket, or some other misfortune would happen that would damage the recorded data. And in general, it’s a pity to click through such an expensive thing through negligence. The guys from LaCie showed that they know how to listen to their customers and released a new line of secure HDDs and SSDs called Rugged.

On the official page, there is a rather loud statement that LaCie Rugged “can be put under the wheels of a car, dropped from a height of two meters, and then left to get wet in the rain for a while, after which it will find its own way home and return to the pocket of a backpack. The last one is a joke, but everything else is not. YouTube has a video with drop tests in which the hard drive is thrown from the second and even the third floor (and this is by no means a two-meter height), they move on a sports bike and water it from a garden hose, after which it connects to a smartphone as if nothing had happened or laptop and shows that all data is in order. Considering that LaCie doesn't boast any military certifications, and the drive itself with a rubber bumper does not look very impressive, this is a really cool result.

Otherwise, this is a quite ordinary high-level HDD that delivers the maximum speeds available for this format (about 130 MB / s for reading and writing) and, like many other LaCie products, it is sharpened to work with Apple technology: USB-C connection, support Thunderbolt and easy integration with Apple Time Machine for system backups. However, no one forbids using it with other operating systems, you just have to reformat it and buy another cable if your computer or laptop does not have a USB-C port. Although, this is now becoming less and less common. Another issue is that the price is too high and for working with Windows it would be more expedient to take another protected HDD without being tied to Apple technology.