portable hard drive

[Sandra_85]

hi I have a Asus r554l laptop can i use a HP Pocket Media drive - 500 GB - USB external hard drive to store my pics? My USB port is a 3.0 I think the hard drive is a 2.0 USB port I am running windows 10 thank you

 

[ffg7]

yes.

 

[atljsf]

usb is backwards compatible 3 works on 2 and 2 works on 3

it just works on the speed of the slowest side, it will work at usb 2 speeds if the hard disk is usb 2, that means around 40 megabytes per second read and 20 megabytes write more or less, values do change alot with some devices and with some types of files

if the usb is 3.1 type c, it will work but you need a converter from usb type c to usb 3, there the usb 2 will be connected and should work as expected

 

[photonboy]

Hey,
If the USB connector fits then it's compatible.

The transfer speed however will drop down to whatever the bottleneck is. If the laptop is USB2 then your transfer speed is at best likely about 32MBps.

That really doesn't matter for transferring pictures. If they were say 10MB each (very good quality) then that's about three per second or almost 200 in a minute.

OTHER:
Note that some devices have a USB3.1 Type-C connector which is not compatible directly (without adapter).

OTHER:
You may want to consider making a compressed, backup IMAGE of your Windows partition as well. I prefer Acronis True Image. If the SSD/HDD in your laptop fails then you can buy a new one (or replace under warranty), then restore the backup as of the date you made the image. Also helps if you get really bad malware infection or data corruption.

OTHER:
I have a USB HDD attached to a computer and mirror a folder using a free program called "SyncbackSE FREE". If you want the pictures on the laptop AND as backup on the HDD which I highly recommend (or they're gone if the USB drive fails) then consider that as a somewhat automated solution.

You can set a reminder to plug in your HDD using Calendar software, then when you do that if you set things up correctly SyncbackSE should just auto backup the pictures.

(be careful with MIRROR vs BACKUP as to when and how things get deleted... for example, you don't want to accidentally delete the pictures on the laptop then have the software decide to mirror that by deleting the USB pictures. One way to solve this is to NOT ALLOW deletion of files on the target drive. You can go in and handle that manually or whatever.)

 

[Sandra_85]

Thank you everyone!

 

[ffg7]

the hp drive appears to have usb 3 https/www.amazon.ca/HP-500GB-Pocket-Media-Drive/dp/B0085WEK88