UGREEN Hard Drive Cable, USB 3.0 Type A to Micro USB B Cable, External Hard Drive Lead Compatible with Western, Seagate Expansion, Toshiba Canvio, Galaxy S5 Note 3, Camera(0.5M)

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The M.2 connector is designed for small form factor devices, so you will mostly see it inside of tablets and laptops. This connector supports both wireless cards and SSDs, as well as NVMe commands. Serial ATA is the most common connection for internal drives in modern PCs and Macs. There can be multiple SATA ports on any one motherboard or controller card. One cable connects one hard drive to one port on the motherboard (as opposed to Parallel ATA). Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.

Sometimes taking out the hard drive and putting it into a new enclosure is the only way. Photograph: Alamy Research your EHD online to find out how big the drive is (2.5 inch or 3.5 inch) and the type of drive (usually SATA), so you can buy the correct enclosure. Plastic enclosures are cheap and mostly good enough. Metal enclosures with built-in fans are better for cooling a hard drive that is in constant use and making it last longer. Another important aspect is cable length. Short cables are great for portability, but that can leave you sitting on the floor next to a power outlet as your phone charges. On the other hand, a cable that's too long can be inconvenient to carry, will tangle more easily, and is potentially a tripping hazard.

For capacity, traditional hard drives (HDDs) offer a lot more options, but SSDs are generally able to house the same amount of storage in a smaller amount of space. USB 3.x is the current standard for USB speeds. It's much faster than USB 2.0, and thus recommended for devices like external hard drives. You can typically identify a USB 3.x port or connector by its blue coloring. Some USB 3.0 ports also have an SS symbol (which stands for Super Speed). Most new computers have at least one USB 3 port, and high-quality flash drives use this standard. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells—similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM—to save data. It is also worth noting that adaptors are generally available for PC power supplies that feature alternative types of power connectors. SATA Cables for HDDs

You'll only see the speed benefits of Thunderbolt, however, if you have a drive that's SSD-based, or a multi-drive, platter-based desktop DAS that is set up in a RAID array. For ordinary external hard drives, Thunderbolt is very much the exception, not the rule. It tends to show up mainly in products geared toward the Mac market. Do you care more about speed, capacity, or price? If it’s the first, SSDs store data in flash memory rather than on spinning platters the way traditional hard drives do and thus operate a whole lot faster. The interface can also make a difference; Thunderbolt 3 will be a lot faster than USB, for example. Type-B: An almost-square connector, mostly used for printers and other powered devices that connect to a computer. They're not very common these days, as most devices have moved onto a smaller connection. Device Manager is the program you need to manage drivers and see whether there’s a problem. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Connect the SATA cable to the port on the hard drive, then connect the other end of the cable to the motherboard, taking care not to disturb or impede the connection to the existing HDD Seagate products that have this connection are: FreeAgent XTreme, FreeAgent Pro (classic), and the Seagate eSATA drive. Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. The storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.)

The USB cable has two ends - one to connect into the drive, and one to connect into the computer. See in this image the 'A' connector, which will fit into a corresponding rectangular port on your computer. Sometimes these ports are found both on the front and the rear of your computer. Usually it is OK to connect the drive either to the front or to the rear, though if trouble occurs, it is best to connect it to the port on the rear. See here a graphic of the eSATA cable and the port. Please note that the cable's connector and the port look similar to that of a normal Serial ATA connector and port, but they are not intercompatible due to small physical differences. The SFF-8639 connector was renamed to a more consumer friendly U.2. This connector is used with some new NVMe SSDs. U.2 utilizes 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes to provide speeds much faster than the SATA interface. Since most motherboards do not have a U.2 connector on them, a M.2 to U.2, or PCIe to U.2 adapter can be used. Some external hard drives draw their power from the USB port and they may not get enough. This can be a problem if the PC’s motherboard does not supply enough power to the USB port you are using or if the drive is plugged into a non-powered hub. EHDs that have their own power supplies tend to work more reliably.CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 (8GB workloads, single-thread sequential read and write, queue depths of 1 and 8) Powered eSATA provides high performance like eSATA, but like USB 2.0 it also provides electrical power to operate a drive without needing to use a separate power cable for the drive. This interface is even more rare than eSATA. One of the types of FreeAgent GoFlex upgrade cables, which is compatible with the FreeAgent GoFlex and GoFlex Pro, uses the Powered eSATA interface.