We’ve got nothing against dongles-those connectors that consolidate many different ports into one or two ports plugged into your computer-in theory. Speaking of ports, your bottleneck could also be the type of port connecting the hard drive to your computer.Įven if you’re downloading to the fastest possible hard drive and connected to the fastest possible port, you’ll still likely face a bottleneck if you’ve connected a dongle to that port.

Doing so avoids slowdowns from any potential hardware or software conflicts.įor best results, make sure the drive is connected to your computer’s fastest port. MacBook Pro users should use an Apple drive, for example. Use a drive that’s native to your computer. If you’re a video professional, you’ll like to read the top 5 external hard drives for video pros.

This one’s pretty obvious, right? Here’s a list of some of the fastest external hard drives on the market. Especially older drives that may need disk cleanup or defragmentation (we recommend just buying a new drive). Mechanical spinning drives that read or write at 7200 or 5400 RPM, on the other hand, definitely could be. Generally, if you’re using an SSD, the drive itself is probably not your bottleneck. SSDs are super fast and write data at speeds that keep up with most file transfer interactions. In terms of the actual drive itself, you should: 1. If internet speeds are solid and you absolutely must use an external hard drive to download large files, you can optimize your drive setup for the fastest possible download speeds. It doesn’t matter if everything else is blazing fast: If you’ve got a bottleneck, your download will be slow. Any dongles connected to those ports which end up splitting your port bandwidth (Macbook users, we’re looking in your direction).ĭownloads are only as fast as your slowest bottleneck, after all.The connection port on your computer or.An external drive-induced performance drop-off can occur at several stops along the data transfer pathway, including: We get it.īut here’s the thing: external drives and their connections are one of the most common causes of download speed bottlenecks and slowdowns. You don’t have much space on your local disk.

Here’s some advice that’s sure to save significant time the next time you download large files: don’t download to an external hard drive. Like a video editor who needs to download a batch of footage for a last-minute project. No one likes slowdowns and delays when downloading large files-especially on a deadline.

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