However, USB comes in many speeds: 5Gbps, 10Gbps, 20GBps, and-eventually with USB4-40Gbps as with Thunderbolt 3/4. The vast majority of external drives today are USB drives. Then again, if you really want rugged–go the SSD route. The latter is designed to take bumps in a laptop, even when powered up. While a desktop hard drive (read 3.5-inch) provides far more capacity (up to 26TB currently if you’re a data center), it also requires a power cable, weighs more, and generally won’t be as shock resistant as a portable 2.5-inch hard drive. I.e., the larger the capacity, the more backups over a longer period of time you can keep, or the more PCs you can back up to the same drive.
If you have 1TB of storage in your PC, a 2TB drive allows you to make a full backup while keeping previous versions, as well as additional differential and incremental backups. So how much storage do you actually need? For backup, we recommend a drive that’s at least twice the capacity of the total amount of data residing on your PC’s internal storage. But it also means higher total cost, and not everyone needs maximum capacity.
The best “value,” as you can see, typically means the most capacious hard drives. The worst value for an external hard drive is typically the lowest-capacity drive. If you don’t need that much storage, go with the more affordable 1TB or 2TB capacities–all T7 Shields boast 10Gbps transfer speeds, which is always a nice speed boost over older 5Gbps external drives. While the 4TB model is capable of handling the largest end-user data sets, it’s also a bit pricey. Going hiking with your data? A T7 Shield is a good choice, and you can secure it with software-based password protection in lieu of a fingerprint. The T7’s predecessor, the Samsung Touch distinguished itself with a fingerprint reader for data security, but the Shield models lean towards physical protection, with IP65 ratings against particulate matter and water spray.
With far more room for stuff than the previous 1TB and 2TB versions, it still plays to the company’s excellent track record of speed and durability established by earlier iterations. We’re fans of the original Samsung T7 Shield, but we’re ever bigger fans of the larger capacity 4TB version (See what we did there?).
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