#Seagate expansion 8tb crystal diskmark Pc
#Seagate expansion 8tb crystal diskmark plus
#Seagate expansion 8tb crystal diskmark professional

It looks cool as hell - someone at LaCie clearly likes HAL 9000 - and it has a wide, rubberised base that makes it practically slip-proof.

#Seagate expansion 8tb crystal diskmark professional

The LaCie D2 Professional easily sweeps this category it’s the only one that appears to have had any thought put into the design besides “gamer” and “non-gamer.” This drive is built like a tiny little tank out of a single sheet of aluminium (and as a result, according to an unscientific measurement using a bathroom scale, weighs a hefty three pounds). It’s quite bright to start with, but once it gets into strobe mode, it becomes actively distracting.

More troubling is the LED indicator light, which blinks rapidly whenever the drive is being accessed. Unfortunately, it has a flimsy, detachable plastic base with small rubber pads that don’t actually seem to reach the desk or shelf, resulting in the same scratch potential as the WD_Black. The Fantom G-Force 3 is quite solid looking, with an aluminium frame and mesh sides for air flow. Its My Book counterpart does have rubber strips on the bottom and runs quietly, but it’s bulky looking, made out of plastic, and is honestly kind of hideous. It’s also rather loud, and when it was shifted at all from the upright position, it began making the kind of noises that it really, really shouldn’t. The plastic base doesn’t have any kind of rubber padding and might be capable of scratching whatever it’s sitting on. It has two 7.5 watt USB Type-A plugs for charging accessories, but they aren’t capable of data transfer. The WD_Black is marketed as a gaming drive, which is probably why Western Digital settled on some kind of design inspired by an airbrushed shipping container.

However, the lack of a wider base and the plastic build left me nervous about what would happen if a desk got bumped. The two USB 3.0 ports on the front of the unit are a nice touch, and it has rubber feet that are relatively good at preventing sliding. While it’s relatively compact compared to some of the other drives on our list, it also looks like a low-resolution prop from Counter-Strike: Source’s cs_office map.

#Seagate expansion 8tb crystal diskmark plus

The Seagate Backup Plus Hub is one of the cheaper options on this list, and it looks the part, too. Still, none of these drives are cheap, and it’s not too much to want one that looks good, isn’t flimsy, and doesn’t have any annoying flaws. If you’re just looking for bulk storage - in the form of an external hard drive that requires its own power supply and is likely just going to be sitting somewhere - aesthetics might not be your top priority. (Our test machine was my PC, a Threadripper 2950X on an AMD X399 board with USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports.) The Best Designed External Hard Drive For pricing, we also considered warranty length, which is generally correlated with a manufacturer’s confidence in an overall lifetime. Performance and price are more straightforward: We ran tests on the drives straight out of the box and looked up the cheapest purchase price for each model. Other factors included how sturdy the drives are and other factors, like additional features (USB ports, etc) and whether there’s any annoying catches. For design, you want a drive that looks attractive on a desk or shelf - admittedly our least important consideration - and won’t fall over, scratch surfaces, or make a lot of noise. We took these drives and ranked them on three criteria for the home data hoarder: design, performance, and price. After a bit of searching, we came up with these five 8TB options: So we decided it’s time for a Battlemodo on the best options for anyone who, like me, could use a few more terabytes of local storage. Importantly, they also do not require me to open up my computer. USB 3.0 drives are fast enough to be convenient for most purposes other than professional work or gaming. They offer stationary, bulk storage for photos, videos, backups, work files, and random downloads at a much cheaper price than SSDs. This is not good! My bytes are at risk!Īn external hard disk drive is the ideal solution to this kind of problem.

#Seagate expansion 8tb crystal diskmark Pc

The remaining space on my desktop PC is mostly in the form of a hard disk drive labelled “Seagate 2014” - which may be generous - and another 1 terabyte Toshiba that I have no memory of acquiring but appears to have been first released in 2013. Data hoarding is somewhat of a lost art these days, thanks in large part to streaming services, cloud storage, faster internet access, and uh, digital rights management.īut that old itch is back, and I’m running out of storage space on my solid state drives.