How to Find the Right External Drive for You

It can be really difficult figuring out which drive is right for you with all of the options available. The technology can be confusing, and there can be many “gotchas” as you weigh your options that are not always obvious until after you’ve made your purchase.

But how can you know if you’re buying the right drive for your needs?

I’m Michelle for RocketYard, and today I’m going to make it easy to decide which OWC drive is right for you.

Typically, when figuring out which drive is best for your needs, it usually comes down to the following factors:

• How much data can you store on the drive? I’ll refer to this as “capacity.”
• How fast is the drive? I’ll refer to this as “speed.”
• How big or portable is the drive? I’ll refer to this as “form-factor.”
• And how much does the drive cost? You guessed it – I’ll refer to this as “cost.”

There are four primary types of external drives that OWC makes and they all emphasize different aspects of these factors. I’m going to break them down individually, and once you understand the categories and who they’re for, it should be easy to figure out which one is right for you.

To begin, we’ll start with the Mercury Elite series. If you just need a decently sized hard drive that doesn’t need to be particularly fast, or that you want to use as a backup drive, the mercury lineup is perfect. Dollar for dollar you won’t find a better value per Terabyte than the Mercury Elite lineup. For the average person who needs a standard external hard drive for basic video, audio, photos, or backup needs, the Mercury lineup was designed for you.

If you need something extremely fast and affordable in a tiny form factor, then you have to check out the Envoy Pro lineup. Perfect for creatives, presenters, musicians, DJs, teachers – anyone who is on the go and needs a drive with blazing fast speeds that won’t break their budget. Many portable drives often take forever to copy files or are flimsy, but the Envoy Pro Lineup is all based on NVME technology and built to be durable to guarantee you’ll be ready for any high-pressure situation.

If you’re a professional video editor, someone who needs a ton of disk space, or someone who needs maximum speed, you’re going to want to look at the Thunderbay series. They are basically the Mac Trucks of the OWC storage world. Designed as 4 and 8 bay solutions with SSD or HDD options, the Thunderbay gives you the best all-around balance of capacity, speed, and cost. It is also the only drive in the lineup that is designed for large projects, as the Thunderbay 8 can hold up to an incredible 144 Terabytes in a single enclosure.

Finally, If speed is all that matters, the Thunderblade is your best bet. For VFX artists, colorists, DITs, or anyone who needs high capacity with no compromises to speed, the Thunderblade is the ultimate solution. With capacities up to 16TB and speeds up to 2800 Megabytes per second, there is almost nothing you can throw at a Thunderblade that it can’t handle.

In the future, we’ll go more in-depth on the different product lines and what they can do, but hopefully, now you have a basic understanding of how to approach your storage needs with OWC.

I’m Michele for RocketYard. Thank you for watching.