However, there are multiple types of storage, and it can be handy to know what they are and the differences between them, whether you’re in need of new storage, replacement storage, or even when you’re shopping for a new laptop.

When we talk about storage in a computer, we’re typically talking about what’s called a hard drive. This is the device (in various forms) where the actual storing of data, all those ones and zeroes that your computer understands, takes place.

Mechanical Hard Drives: Inexpensive, but not cutting edge

For most of personal computing history, if you had a hard drive, it was a mechanical type that used rapidly spinning disks within a solid enclosure.

If you think of an old-school jukebox that flipped between LPs, you’re a million miles away from the way that a mechanical hard drive works. It too has a reading head that can flip between disk layers to read individual segments of a much more solid disk than your typical vinyl LP.

Mechanical drives still have a place today in computing, largely because they’re still – just – the most cost-effective models on a price-per-gigabyte level. However, that’s offset by the fact that, because there is a mechanical moving component to this type of hard drive, they’re slower than the other prevalent form of storage for your computer

SSDs: Super-fast, Super-Flexible

The other competing memory standard for hard drives – and other storage media – are SSDs, or Solid State Drives to unpack that acronym for you. SSDs have no moving parts, storing all the data electronically on silicon chips in essence.

SSDs can be massively faster than mechanical drives within a PC, because – again going back to my LP analogy – there’s little of the same seek time waiting for a needle to hit just the right part of a track.

SSDs are also quite a bit more flexible, because the shaping of the silicon wafers can encompass smaller or larger storage devices. That’s not just a question of capacity but also physical volume. Switching to external drives, an external SSD will typically be quite a lot smaller than an external mechanical hard drive of the same storage capacity.

So why isn’t everything SSD?

SSDs are faster, quieter and more energy efficient than traditional hard drives, but there are some challenges that mean that mechanical hard drives still have their place.

For a start, while SSD prices have dropped in recent years, they’re still comparatively pricey, so those on a budget still tend to flock to mechanical drives, especially for higher capacity drives.

The other factor relates to the core technologies within an SSDs. Most are rated for a set number of reading and writing cycles, but critically when an SSD fails, it’s considerably harder to recover any data from it. It’s not exactly easy from a mechanical drive either, which is why specialised data recovery is so pricey, but in many cases of SSD failure, it’s downright impossible.

Where do USB Flash drives fit into all of this?

USB Flash drives – those near ubiquitous “thumb drives” count as storage too. They’re broadly using the same technologies as SSDs, but with simpler control interfaces and typically much lower speeds.

If you’re after a simple and cheap way to transport file, a USB Flash drive is a great option, because they’re very inexpensive. However, the flip side of that is that they’re not as well built as most external SSDs or mechanical hard drives, and even harder to recover data from in the event of a disaster.

Why is my hard drive so slow?

There’s a couple of reasons why you might hit less-than-stellar speeds on a hard drive. As noted, mechanical drives are the slowest of the species, so if you’re using one of those, they’ll be a little less nippy.

If you’re using an external hard drive, the interface you use also matters a lot. While USB is the standard here, and most simply use a rectangular USB A type plug, the speeds of different USB ports on your computer end will also influence your overall speed. Plug a super-fast SSD into a USB 2.0 port, and you’ll get much slower speed than if it’s USB 3 or better. Look for ports with a small blue strip edge connector within or check your computer’s specifications to avoid using slower ports.

It also matters what you’re copying to or from an external drive. Computers can handle single larger files with better overall speed than lots of smaller ones, even if the combination of those smaller files amounts to less data!

Think of it this way: If you had one big box to shift across a room, you might move slowly shifting it, but it all goes at once, so the rate of movement is quite regular. That’s our single large file. If you’re copying thousands of files in a directory, it’s like there’s thousands of tiny boxes, and each one must be picked up individually. Easier to carry as singles, but lots of journeys across the room before you’re finally done. The relative age, quality and condition of your computer counts as well, too.

If you answered the processor, or the graphics card, or even the display, I’m sorry to say that you’re wrong. Unless that is you’ve had them gold plated or something silly like that, in which case all bets are off.

No, the most valuable part of your PC or Mac isn’t the hardware at all, even though it might seem like the obvious answer because it cost you real money.

The most valuable part of your computer is your own data, whatever that data is.

It could be business files, personal photos, email correspondence, that half-written novel you’ll finish one day – anything like that.

You might be thinking that maybe your half-finished novel isn’t that great and not worth much at all compared to even the cost of a simple computer mouse. However, the reality here is that any hardware part is replaceable or upgradeable if it’s lost or destroyed.

If you lost your documents, they may very well be irretrievable. Even in the case of fire or accidental laptop drops or similar, while there are data recovery services out there that might be able to assist, the cost of that recovery can run into hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

That’s why your own data is easily the most valuable part of your computer. So how can you protect that investment?

It’s a simple enough process, but it’s one that many of us don’t bother with because it’s seen as dull or difficult. It doesn’t have to be either – and it sure beats the alternative panic scenarios when (not if) something goes wrong with your computer!

Where should I backup my data?

Online (AKA the “cloud”)

Online backup allows for a lot of flexibility if you must recover your files, because you can do it from just about anywhere to any device. For reputable providers, as long as you keep paying your storage fees your files are securely held, so a large scale disaster (like a house fire) wouldn’t wipe them out.

However, cloud storage does rely on uploading your files online, which may make some business users nervous. Upload speeds on most devices are glacially slow, so backing up all your files could take literal days to complete. Typically, those services only look for file changes once the initial backup set is created, so it’s quicker after that, but you can’t expect it to magically have your files minutes after setting it up.

The durability of cloud backups is a big plus, but when you do need recovery, it’s also quite likely to be slow coming back down to you, relative to the internet speed of your connection. That might not be so vital to just get hold of otherwise lost digital photos but could be critically more important for business files.

Local backup

The alternative is to use some kind of local backup media. This could be an external flash drive, hard drive, or writing to an optical DVD or writeable Blu-Ray disc, depending on your needs and preferences.

The advantage of local backup is that it’s a usually quicker, limited only by the copying speeds of your computer and the backup medium itself. It’s also typically faster to recover, as all you need to do in most cases is connect the drive (or drop the disc in the reader) and recreate your data files from there.

The downsides for local storage are that it’s inherently more fragile; a house fire or flood that takes out your laptop will probably not be kind to the hard drive sitting on the same desk at the same time. This kind of backup also has the same eventual failure probability as the drive within your computer, although you can always opt for more complex NAS-style backups to provide a little extra security there.

How do I set up automatic backup on a PC?

If you’re using a cloud service for backup, many of these will have their own software for backing up your files.

If you’re backing up locally from a Windows PC, there are third-party applications, but you can just use Microsoft’s own File History tool to create a rolling backup file on an external device such as a hard drive or flash drive. Here’s how:

1. Press Start
2. Open Control Panel – you can type this in or select it if it comes up in the app list
3. Select System & Security
4. Click on File History
5. Click on ‘Save Backup Copies of Your Files with File History’

The default that Microsoft uses is to back up pretty much everything in your standard files and libraries folders, but if you don’t want to back up specific folders or you have them organised in an unusual way you can select specifics here, as well as choosing the backup drive to save to.

No, you can’t save a backup to the same drive the files are on, because that would defeat the purpose. What you can do is choose how often Windows looks for new files to back up, under Advanced Settings.

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How do I set up automatic backups on a Mac?

Apple’s Mac OS has its own automated backup system, called Time Machine. Again, this relies on an external drive plugged into your Mac and a small amount of setup. Once it’s running, as with Windows, it’s nicely automatic, and all you have to do is remember to plug in your backup drive on a regular basis to stay at least a little bit safer.

Here’s how to get backup happening on a Mac:

1. Plug in an external drive (USB Flash, external Hard drive or similar)
2. Click on the Apple icon at the top left of your screen.
3. Click on System Preferences
4. Click on Time Machine
5. Click on Select Backup Disk, and then choose the drive you just plugged in.
6. Time Machine will then periodically back up your files to that drive.

Two details to be aware of here are that Time Machine may need to format the drive you plug in; it’s best to ensure you don’t have anything you need on it before starting. It’s a poor idea to use a backup drive for other purposes anyway, so dedicate a specific drive to this purpose and you’re not likely to go wrong.

Time Machine is nicely automated and can just run in the background, but it works within the space capacity of the drive connected. It’s called Time Machine because it grabs daily snapshots of the drive and what’s on it, so you can use it to go back specifically to when a file was on your system if you just accidentally deleted a single file or group of them.

However, to manage that, when the backup Time Machine drive starts to get full, Time Machine will start to remove the oldest versions of files to make space. It’s the compromise to make sure it can always keep a relatively recent backup to hand, because that’s more likely what most people will want.

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USB drives are a really handy way to store and share documents, whether that’s your precious family photos, spreadsheets for your business or music that you want to shift from one computer to another. The price of USB drives is really cheap for the storage they have, but just like any storage, you can often find that a nearby USB drive is already full when you need that little bit of extra space.

If it’s just a small quantity of space you need, you could always delete a single file or two, but if you need the whole USB stick – or if it contains files, you no longer want or need – it’s more efficient to fully format that USB drive.

Without getting too deep into the computing nitty gritty, formatting a drive tells the drive (and anything you might plug it into) that all the space on that drive is available for new files to be stored on it. It totally wipes everything on the drive and sets the drive up for the best and most logical arrangement of new files to be written to it.

But how do you easily format a drive that’s already got content on it? Here’s how.

Bear in mind – and this is super important – that formatting a drive will wipe everything on that drive with little hope of recovery. As such, it’s vital to ensure you no longer need those files, or that you have them stored somewhere else if you do.

Formatting a USB drive in Windows

First step is to plug the USB drive into your Windows PC or laptop. Most USB drives still use the bigger rectangular USB plug type (Type A), but some newer drives have oval (Type C) connectors. If you’ve got a size mismatch – an oval plug and only square sockets or vice versa – you can buy adaptors to overcome that.

Windows should recognise the drive relatively quickly, and it may pop up a little notification asking what you want to do with removable storage. If it doesn’t, it’s not a big drama. Open up File Explorer, often found in your lower taskbar as a manilla folder icon, or you can just start typing “file explorer” without the quotes into the search box in the lower left-hand corner and it should find it.

A big and vital step here is identifying which drive is your USB drive. Windows refers to drives by alphabetical letters, with the C: drive almost always your onboard hard drive storing Windows and all your files. Never, ever proceed with this until you’re 100% confident you’ve got the right drive letter.

One quick way to verify this within File Explorer is to look at the capacity and drive icon. If you know you’ve got an 8GB flash drive, look for a drive with slightly less than that as its total capacity. It’s likely it’ll be the smallest drive on your computer. To be double sure, click into it to see if the files you’d expect to be there are present. If you see folders like “Windows” or “Program Files”, that’s not it, for sure.

Again, be certain that you have the right drive and want to wipe it, because recovery is difficult to impossible depending on the choices you make from here on in.

Formatting is built into file explorer, and all you need to do to start is right click with your mouse or on the trackpad area on your laptop used for right clicking on the drive itself.

You should get a pop-up menu with an option labelled “Format”.

Choose that option, and you’ll get another fresh window identifying your drive, its capacity and the file system to be used. In most consumer cases you can leave everything as it is here, although if you do want to label the drive (under Volume Label) you can call it anything you’d like with standard alphabet and number characters. Some computers and systems will struggle with spaces and punctuation marks, so it’s best to avoid those.

There’s one more choice to make here, and it’s the option of Quick Format. The easiest way to explain this is to pretend your USB drive is like a neighbourhood, and you’re the town planner, looking at redevelopment. Quick Format essentially labels an area as ready for demolition, but (strictly speaking) nothing gets knocked down just yet.

It simply tells the computer that the space on the drive is fine to overwrite with new data. It’s faster, but if you have sensitive data, or want to be sure that the data is gone, you’d unselect this. To keep with our neighbourhood analogy, that’s the equivalent of sending in the bulldozers to flatten the entire place. There are tools that can sometimes recover from a Quick Format if it’s accidental, but it’s not assured in any way.

A full format is unlikely to be recoverable, and if you’ve got data that must be wiped for business or personal reasons, there are apps that can do what’s called a secure erase. To further torture our analogy, you’re sending in the bulldozers once, then building new houses, then bulldozing again. Good luck recovering the original house from that situation, but then that’s very much the point.

You will get another warning that you’re about to wipe all the data on the disk before you proceed. Check that you’ve got the right drive and no longer want the data and click the OK button if you’re certain.

Once the format is complete – typically this should just take a few seconds – your USB drive is good to go, fresh as the day you purchased it.

Formatting a USB drive in macOS

Apple’s macOS uses a similar sort of setup for formatting drives, but with a more visual twist. Here you want an app called Disk Utility, which you can find in your Applications folder under Utilities. You can more quickly find it by pressing Command+Space to invoke Spotlight search and typing “Disk Utility”.

Disk Utility does make it easier to spot your external drives, because they’ll be found under the section called “External Drives”. Click on the USB drive so it’s highlighted, and then on the “Erase” button.

Here you can rename your soon-to-be-formatted drive if you wish, as well as select its format options. Disk Utility has secure erase functions built into it under the Security Options button if you need that. Make your choices, double check that you’ve got the right drive and backups in place and click erase. For most USB drives it should only take a few seconds, and your drive’s good to go with all of its storage available for whatever you want to keep there.

Check out our page on Data Recovery if you have lost precious data such as photos, videos, documents and more, or if you’re looking to protect and backup your files, read our page on Data Backup and Transfer.