Your portable hard drive should also draw all the power it needs from the USB port, no power adapter necessary. (We discuss rugged portable drives, which are bulkier and more expensive than the portable drives we recommend for most people, in the Competition section.) But all hard drives die, and it’s still possible to buy a lemon that will die too soon.
Only three companies-Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba-still manufacture hard drives, and all of them make reliable options. Reliability: Although reliability is the most important factor for any storage device, solid information on reliability is hard to come by.
