Which Monitor and External Hard Drive Should I Choose for Working From Home?
If you’ve previously had all of your tech needs handled by your company, but they’ve since sent you to work from home with little more than a laptop in your name, this can be a frustrating transition. And since we are all probably expecting a few more months of self-isolation, it makes sense to do a little bit of work at your home workstation with equipment that will help you be productive.
At this point, Lifehacker reader Irene is asking 911 this week:
Hi, this is my first time “WFH” and I need to run Excel and Bloomberg spreadsheets on my laptop and also log into the cloud, etc. Nothing too serious, but my Apple MacBook Pro is not the best one for that. … I’d love to get a monitor and a hard drive, but what is the most compact / mobile system you would recommend (we crash at a friends house, avoiding New York, but once this nightmare is over, we’ll go back to New York where we have small apartment no room for the entire office).
Answer:
I found that the biggest obstacle for me when using a laptop in my day to day work is that doing all the operations on the trackpad and keyboard annoys me. I work with the mouse much more productively – in fact, infinitely more. If you haven’t explored this option, I recommend it as your first stop.
This is just a random suggestion – a snack if you will – before we get to the main point of your question. You didn’t mention which MacBook Pro you have, but overall display sizes for MacBook Pros released in recent years range from 13 to 16 inches. Or, as I like to call them, “too small” and “beautiful animal.”
While I could spend the next few paragraphs on display resolutions and how you will notice differences when using different display sizes, I’ll skip all this techno chatter for now as I don’t want you to get bored. …
Which external monitor should you buy?
I’ve spent three years reviewing Wirecutter monitors and I’m sure the smallest display you are likely to want is around 24 inches. A bit lower and the experience isn’t worth it. You won’t like multitasking – or not being able to do it – and you’re likely to get stuck on some 1080p junk, 19-inch display, or whatever. Then why bother with a second display?
When you shop, I recommend shooting with at least a 24-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels. Why not 1080p? You get more screen space – 120 pixels to be precise – and that will make a difference when you’re struggling with spreadsheets or taking a little snooze break to read the news . A 1080p display might save you money, but I don’t think it’s worth it.
As for which monitor to buy, I’m going to go with Wirecutter’s recommendation because I helped test their monitor so I know exactly what’s going on in how they pick up the big display. Since a monitor is a kind of “buy it and you’ll be with it for a while” purchase, I think the Dell UltraSharp U2415 is the way to go .
Why? It is not very expensive. It’s 1920 by 1200. It supports simple HDMI and DisplayPort connections. And most importantly, it is easily adjustable in all the ways you need it – you don’t have to stack a cheap display on a stack of books to raise it to the desired eye level – and its color accuracy is pretty high. It doesn’t really matter for spreadsheets and websites, but if you feel like watching YouTube, playing games, or playing a movie on your new monitor, that’s great. Plus, the monitor’s fast USB 3.0 ports should pair well with your MacBook Pro’s USB-C connectors (if available), and also provide excellent speeds for the external storage you’re looking to buy – if it’s USB 3.0 too.
What kind of external storage should I buy?
On this! I don’t really have any solid guidelines, simply because I haven’t used an external hard drive since, heck, maybe seven or eight years ago. I am concerned about the small hard drives that you move to and fro because one accidental drop to the floor could spell the end of your data. So instead, I place all of my zipped files on a Qnap NAS device and use larger flash drives for my day-to-day needs.
The NAS box is undoubtedly overkill for your needs, but a flash drive? Well, you can get a 256GB USB-A flash drive for around $ 50. That’s a quarter of a terabyte that you can carry around in your pocket – not too shabby and much less bulky than any external or portable drive. You will likely need a USB-C adapter for your MacBook Pro if purchased in the past few years, but that shouldn’t add much to the cost.
Otherwise, if you just need a lot of space , Western Digital My Book is a consistent favorite – around $ 100 for 4TB of space. It’s not quite as portable as a flash drive, but it gives you a lot more file space than you probably need, unless you’re planning on starting a video production company during quarantine downtime. I wouldn’t go with the dual-drive version, partly because it costs a lot more, but also because it doubles your chances of data loss if one of the two drives fails.
By the way, I should also point out the point that you should definitely make a backup copy of the contents of your external drive. Be sure to take this important step if you disagree with the potential loss of everything on it in the event of a minor technology glitch. As for where you will dump, say, one terabyte of data, consider a backup service like Backblaze . It will cost you a monthly fee and eat up some bandwidth, but it is much better than losing the critical contents of your external drive at the wrong time.
So this is my advice. If you don’t need a lot of space, but just want a convenient portable way to store a decent amount of files, get a fast USB 3.0 flash drive. (I also have a recommendation Wirecutter this account : Kingston’s the DataTraveler Elite the G2 with a maximum capacity of 128GB.) And if you need a lot of space, you can purchase an external hard drive. I would skip a portable drive, which might be a little faster, but will give you less space for the price and entice you to carry it around – potentially losing and / or breaking it, making it half the point to buy a larger chunk of external storage.