It doesn’t really matter how the drive looks, just that it will work for a long time. If you’re backing up precious photos, home videos, or important files, buy a name brand, desktop-sized hard drive from a company with a track record of reliability, and pay a little more for it. My advice: purchase your drive with a specific purpose in mind. That low percentage may seem reassuring, but it obscures the reality that heavy drive use increases failures over time, and some drives are much better-suited to heavy use than others. So drive makers switched to a different but even less useful metric: Annualized Failure Rate (AFR), which estimates the percentage of total drives made that will fail in a year due to manufacturing defects. All an AFR of “0.73%” suggests is that 7,300 of 1,000,000 drives will likely develop problems in year one due to defects rather than abuse.

Unfortunately, MTBF numbers were only predictions - and often inaccurately high. Desktop drives typically promised higher MTBFs than laptop drives, but there were exceptions. Each year has 61,320 hours, so a drive with a MTBF of 300,000 hours would promise to last 4.9 years if actively used 24 hours each day. Hard drive longevity used to be measured with an estimate of “Mean Time Before Failure” (MTBF). However - and this is really important - if you keep a typical drive mechanism running 24 hours each day for two years, it’s going to burn out. They’ll generally last much longer if you don’t use them every day. Most hard drives are guaranteed to work for one to two years no matter what you do with them, ranging from occasional backups to continuous video streaming. So in this How-To, I’m going to discuss the big issues you need to consider, and guide you towards the best external hard drive for your needs… Some hard drives are really cheap but have a higher chance of failing after a year or two of heavy use. For $139!īut buying an external hard drive isn’t necessarily that simple. There are a bunch of factors worth considering before making a purchase, including everything from reliability to portability, design, capacity, speed, and connectivity. Or you could store a decade worth of digital photos alongside a giant media library. Since Apple doesn’t even sell a Mac with that much disk space, you could back up five (or more) computers to that drive without running out of room.

For traditional drives, prices are low, options are numerous, and capacities are so high that your only choices are “enough space,” “more than enough space,” and “way more than enough space.” I could point you towards a gigantic 5-Terabyte $139 Seagate USB 3.0 hard drive right now and end this article without another paragraph. I feel old saying this, but having used computers since before external hard drives existed, I can say with certainty that buying a hard drive is easier today than it’s ever been before.

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