what to look for in external hard drive
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The Best External Hard Drives for 2022
Laptop drive almost full? Need to back up your photos? Desktop-size and portable platter storage has never been cheaper. Our deep-dive reviews help you rails down the right external difficult drive.
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In an era when 50GB of iCloud storage is 99 cents per month, and trim, slim external SSDs are getting cheaper, external hard drives, based on spinning platter disks, might announced less essential than they once were. Merely modernistic ones are faster, more stylish, and ofttimes more than durable than their counterparts from a few years agone. They're ever more capacious for the money, too. For almost $50, you tin add a terabyte of actress storage to your laptop or desktop by just plugging in a USB cable.
(Photograph: Molly Flores)
Choosing an external drive isn't as simple as ownership the most expensive one you can afford, notwithstanding. The bulldoze capacity is the most important factor to consider, and it tin can increment or decrease the cost dramatically depending on your needs. Other factors include the concrete size of the drive (is information technology designed to exist carted around, or to sit down on your desk-bound?), how rugged information technology is, the interface it uses to connect to your PC, and even what colors it comes in. This guide will help you make sense of these and many more questions that arise while you're shopping for an external hard drive.
Weighing the Need for Speed: Hard Drive or SSD?
Hard drives may get you more capacity for your dollar past far, simply first you lot need to consider a major difference in external storage these days: the hard drive versus the SSD.
Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your information. Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed past a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells—similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM—to salve data.
Only how much faster is information technology to access data stored in flash cells? Typical read and write speeds for consumer drives with spinning platters are in the 100MBps to 200MBps range, depending on platter densities and whether they spin at v,400rpm (more than common) or vii,200rpm (less mutual). External SSDs offering at to the lowest degree twice that speed and at present, oftentimes much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of information (say, a 4GB feature-length flick, or a year'due south worth of family photos) to an external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning bulldoze.
Not but is it faster to read and write information stored in flash cells, but it'due south also safer. Because at that place is no spinning platter or moving magnetic head, if you bump the SSD while you're accessing its data, there is no risk that your files will get corrupted and unreadable.
Withal, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the all-time we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server cupboard still virtually exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.
And portable hard drives can be a keen value if what you lot need is raw capacity above all else. You lot tin observe a 2TB portable hard drive with ease (peradventure even a 4TB i, depending on the day) for less than $100. A 2TB SSD, though? Expect to pay at least two to three times as much as you lot would for that 2TB hard drive. And permit'due south not even talk about the toll of 4TB and 8TB external SSDs.
Physical Size Matters: Get a Desktop Drive, or a Portable I?
If yous accept a large media-file collection—mayhap you are a photo or video editor, or maybe a movie buff—you'll probable need several terabytes of infinite in which to store information technology. In that case, your best option is a desktop-class hard drive. We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives within and requiring a dedicated power cable plugged into Ac power to piece of work. (Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.)
(Photograph: Molly Flores)
A desktop drive with a single platter machinery will typically use a 3.v-inch drive within and comes in capacities up to 12TB, though a few 16TB single drives in external chassis take started to emerge. Most are roughly 5 inches tall and 2 inches wide. In addition to storing large media collections, these drives can also serve every bit inexpensive repositories for backups of your computer'southward hard drive that y'all schedule, using either software that comes with the drive or a third-party backup utility.
The next size upward for consumer desktop drives is about the same meridian but twice as broad, to conform more than one platter-based hard bulldoze machinery in the chassis. These larger models are more expensive but likewise much more than capacious—think 16TB or more (in that case, populated by two 8TB drive mechanisms). In the instance of these and single-platter-drive products, you lot're not meant to bandy out the drive or drives inside.
(Photo: Zlata Ivleva)
The largest desktop drives are often much, much bulkier than the first two categories, so large that you'll want to stick them under your desk or in a defended server closet. They're mostly intended for professional person use in editing studios, surveillance control rooms, and the like. Their defining characteristic is the ability to swap drives in and out of their multi-bay chassis hands, and so nigh provide quick access to the drive bays at the front of the device.
Almost such multi-bay devices are sold without the bodily hard drives included, so yous tin can install whatever drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. The storage manufacture refers to these (also as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "directly attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.)
At the other cease of the physical-size spectrum are portable drives. Hard bulldoze-based portables make use inside of the aforementioned kinds of platter-bulldoze mechanisms used in laptops. These are called generically "2.5-inch drives," though they are actually a smidge wider than that. Any portable platter-based hard drive should fit easily in a handbag or fifty-fifty a glaze pocket. Every bit a rule, portable drives become their ability from the estimator to which you lot connect them, through the interface cable, and then there's no need for a wall outlet or a power cord/brick.
(Photo: Zlata Ivleva)
The best fashion to gauge relative value among similar portable drives is to calculate the toll per gigabyte, dividing the cost of the bulldoze in dollars by the capacity in gigabytes to see the relative per-gig price. Example: A $60 1TB (1,000GB) hard bulldoze would run you nearly 6 cents per gigabyte, while an $eighty 2TB (2,000GB) drive would piece of work out to nigh iv cents per gigabyte.
Demand Back-up or Extreme Speed? Consider a RAID-Enabled Bulldoze
If y'all buy a larger desktop drive with two or more discrete spinning-platter drive mechanisms inside, yous'll almost certainly have the pick to configure the drive as a RAID array using included software. Depending on which RAID level you cull, you can prioritize capacity, speed, or data redundancy, or some combination thereof.
(Photograph: Zlata Ivleva)
A collection of spinning drives configured with a RAID level designed for faster data access can approximate the speeds of a basic SSD, while yous should consider a drive with support for RAID levels 1, v, or 10 if y'all're storing actually important data that you tin can't afford to lose. Hit the link higher up for an explanation of the traits and strengths of each RAID level. Some crave you to sacrifice raw chapters for information redundancy, and so you'll want to pay attention to the nuances of each level.
Which Drive Interface Should You Expect For?
How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is 2nd just to the blazon of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data. These connection types are e'er in flux, but these days, virtually external hard drives utilise a flavour of USB, or in rare cases, Thunderbolt.
Right now, the fastest mainstream connection type is Thunderbolt iii, which is handy assuming you lot have a newer laptop or desktop with a Thunderbolt iii port. (Thunderbolt 4 is still emerging in new PCs, just drives that utilize it and PCs that back up it are non notwithstanding common.) All belatedly-model Apple MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops have them, and many high-end Windows x laptops do, besides. This interface piggybacks on a USB Blazon-C connector (non all USB Blazon-C ports support Thunderbolt iii, though) and offers blazing superlative throughput of up to 40GBps. Every bit a bonus, a desktop bulldoze that supports Thunderbolt 3 might also come with boosted DisplayPort and USB connections that allow you to apply the drive box as a hub for your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals. (See our explainer Thunderbolt iii vs. USB-C: What'south the Difference?)
You'll only run into the speed benefits of Thunderbolt iii, however, if you take a drive that's SSD-based, or a multi-drive, platter-based desktop DAS that is set up in a RAID array. For ordinary external hard drives, Thunderbolt is very much the exception, not the dominion. It tends to show up mainly in products geared toward the Mac market.
A desktop hard bulldoze with a single platter-based mechanism inside, or a portable difficult drive, is far more likely to make use of plain former USB instead. Near every recent drive nosotros have reviewed supports USB, and the same goes for laptops and desktops. USB ports are ubiquitous, and many external drives now come with cables with both rectangular USB Type-A connectors and oval-shaped USB Type-C ones to enable adapter-gratis connections to PCs that have only one blazon. If the drive includes only a unmarried cable, you may need an adapter, depending on your calculator'south available USB ports. Be mindful of that.
(Photo: Zlata Ivleva)
In addition to their physical shape differences, USB ports on the estimator side volition variously support USB iii.0, 3.1, or 3.2, depending on the historic period of the reckoner and how upward to engagement its marketing materials are. Y'all don't take to worry about the differences among these three USB specs when looking at ordinary hard drives, though. All are inter-compatible, and you won't meet a speed bump from ane versus the other in the hard drive world. The drive platters' own speed is the limiter, not the flavor of USB 3.
The merely case with hard drives where the USB standard matters much is if you connect a drive to an old-style, low-bandwidth USB 2.0 port, which is ameliorate reserved for items similar keyboards and mice. (Too, if it'south a portable drive, that USB 2.0 port may not supply sufficient power to run the drive in the first place, so the speed shortfall may exist moot.) Whatsoever remotely recent computer will have some faster USB three-class ports, though.
Do Y'all Need to Become Rugged?
If you acquit your drive effectually ofttimes, yous'll want to pay attending to how rugged the bulldoze is. Some models include plastic bumpers, and some even meet military standards for shock and grit protection. (Look for support for specifications such as IP67 or IP68.)
(Photo: Zlata Ivleva)
And of course, if yous're carrying your bulldoze around with you, you want information technology to look nice. Some come in multiple colors, while others are super-slim and ready to be tossed in a pocket.
(Photo: Zlata Ivleva)
Perhaps the only affair you don't demand to pay all that much attention to is the warranty. Sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps? Sure, a long warranty is overnice. But if your drive breaks because you lot dropped it, the warranty likely won't cover that, anyway. Even if the drive fails because of a manufacturing defect, nigh warranties merely replace the drive and don't encompass the cost of recovery services that attempt to rescue your data from the broken bulldoze. The real value lies in what's on your drive, not the drive itself.
So, Which External Hard Drive Should I Purchase?
Also know that you tin can find external drives that exercise way more than merely store your information. Some include SD card readers to offload footage from a photographic camera or drone in the field, while a few specialized models have born Wi-Fi and tin double as a piffling media server, able to connect to more than than one device at a time.
To get you started in the right direction, below are the best external difficult drives (platter-based models) we've tested of late, at a variety of prices and capacities. They're a fine starter mix for your research. Bear in mind that most of them come in a range of capacity options, so know that even if the specific model we tested is too big or small for your needs, the drive maker may well offer it in a more fitting size. And if you want to explore the best external SSDs, as well, click on the preceding link.
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