Your subscription has been confirmed. Example: A $60 1TB (1,000GB) hard drive would run you about 6 cents per gigabyte, while a $80 2TB (2,000GB) drive would work out to about 4 cents per gigabyte. Visit our corporate site. Pretty neat! Sure, it's still expensive, four times the price of an equivalent 2TB drive, and unlikely to be the most nimble performer. Gabe Carey and Matt Hanson also contributed to this article. *Deals are selected by our partner, TechBargains. After 20 hours of new research and testing, we found that the best external desktop hard drive for most people is Western Digital’s 4 TB My Book. Samsung has an excellent reputation for external SSDs, thanks to products like the T3, and the T5 builds on its predecessor by adding a fast USB Type-C connection that ekes out every last drop of performance from the solid state drive inside. High price per gigabyte, due largely to ruggedization and RAID design. If you work with a large number of files and documents it is essential to buy the best external hard drive for your needs. However, for faster speeds, you'll want USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 USB Type-C connection. When it’s wired up, however, don’t expect cutting edge connection tech, as the My Passport Wireless Pro uses only USB Type-B to Type-A. Choosing an external drive isn't as simple as buying the most expensive one you can afford, however. Australian readers: check out a fine alternative in the WD MyBook Duo. Bundled cables for USB Type-A and Type-C on PC side. New York, Bear in mind, though, you'll get no help from the manufacturer if things go awry and you lose your password. The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive combines speed and capacity. When looking for the best external hard drive or storage device, you have to consider some important things like … Good battery life for a wireless hard drive. It comes in different types and connectivity as well, with the Thunderbolt/USB-C option being ideal for MacBook and Dell XPS users, and the RAID option being perfect for creative professionals. You can find a 2TB portable hard drive with ease (possibly even a 4TB one, depending on the day) for less than $100. Five-year warranty with five years of Data Rescue recovery. The best external hard drives will also be quick - either because they use SSD (Solid State Drive) technology, or because they use the latest connectivity technology, such as USB-C. In addition to their physical shape differences, USB ports on the computer side will variously support USB 3.0, 3.1, or 3.2, depending on the age of the computer and how up to date its marketing materials are. And at … Many external hard drives utilize USB 3.0 connections. That’s where the best external hard drive … Kensington lock slot secures only the case, leaving the drives easily removable. We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives inside and requiring a dedicated power cable plugged into AC power to work. It's geared to macOS users, but it will please anyone with an eye for style in their gadgets. The latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport Ultra range of external hard drives is here, coming in sizes from 1TB to 4TB, and they’re among the best external hard drives out there. Seagate Toolkit provides handy backup/recover functions, as well as mirroring. (Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.). (See our explainer Thunderbolt 3 vs. USB-C: What's the Difference?). Best External Hard Drive 2020! © The WD My Book Duo is the absolute largest capacity external hard drive. It supports both 2.5” and 3.5” SATA drives, and delivers fast, efficient performance you may have only dreamed of previously. © 1996-2021 Ziff Davis, LLC. With desktop external hard drives, you can store and backup your important data without any concern. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.). It’s drop, shock, dust, and rain-resistant, making it ideal for surviving the elements when you’re out in nature. Cables for both USB Type-A and Type-C on the client side. For everyone else, there’s a massive 6,400mAh battery built into the device. It also comes with a USB 3.0 port for people without access to Thunderbolt. (Look for support for specifications such as IP67 or IP68.). The 8TB version of the Western Digital My Book is a deep well of affordable storage for your photos, music, videos, and more. Read this first, 10. iStorage diskAshur 2TB external hard drive, GameStop's PS5 restock sells out, but there's some very good news, Where to buy PS5: all the latest restock updates, Apple's privacy labels reveals Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger's hunger for user data, Make Cyberpunk 2077 play much, much better with just two super simple fixes, All black PS5 orders have been cancelled after team received 'threats to their safety', The Samsung Galaxy S21 price reportedly ready to undercut iPhone 12 Pro, Overclocker pushes Intel Rocket Lake-S processor to 6.9GHz, This product is only available in the US at the time of this writing. A 2TB SSD, though? Save a whopping 95% for the first year.View Deal. Before that, he worked for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper, where he occasionally dunked waterproof hard drives in glasses of water. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning drives, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs. Despite all these goodies, it is still one of the cheapest portable drives of this capacity.View Deal, IDrive 5TB Cloud Backup - $69.50 $3.48 per year, direct It also comes in capacities up to 1TB, so you don't have to worry about missing out on storage space just because it uses an SSD - this drive really does hit all the right notes. For ordinary external hard drives, it's very much the exception, not the rule. They offer more storage space for cheaper, so even if they aren’t necessarily faster or more robust, they’re budget-friendlier. And if you're a gamer, picking up a great SSD for your games can really make a difference. USB ports are ubiquitous, and many external drives now come with both rectangular USB-A connectors and oval-shaped USB-C ones to enable adapter-free connections to PCs that have only one type. This interface piggybacks on a USB Type-C connector (not all USB Type-C ports support Thunderbolt 3, though) and offers blazing peak throughput of up to 40GBps. And let's not even talk about the cost of 4TB and 8TB external SSDs. They're ever more capacious for the money, too. Their defining characteristic is the ability to swap drives in and out of their multi-bay chassis easily, so most provide quick access to the drive bays at the front of the device. Read on to see our picks for the best HDDs. LaCie d2 Professional 10TB External Hard Drive Desktop HDD – USB-C USB 3.0 7200 RPM Enterprise Class Drives, 5 Year Warranty and Recovery Service (STHA10000800) 4.3 out of … Unsurprisingly, it doesn't reach the top speeds of solid state external drives, but for external hard drives based on traditional HDDs, this is the drive to consider. This model of Seagate’s 8TB desktop external hard drive assures effective plug & … ), how rugged it is, the interface it uses to connect to your PC, and even what colors it comes in. These are called generically "2.5-inch drives," though they are actually a smidge wider than that. This USB 3.0 drive has many of the features of a fully-fledged NAS device (including a high price), and if you have a router with a USB 3.0 port you could use this as a network attached storage device in its own right. 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. When you consider all that extra security, the prices won't scare you away either. Worth noting that the enclosure used is fully serviceable and that WD ships the drive already pre-formatted for Windows users (NTFS). Of course, not everyone needs a wireless hard drive or SD card support, but for those who do, it’s almost essential. Thank you for signing up to TechRadar. The real value lies in what's on your drive, not the drive itself. Sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps? Read the full review: Samsung Portable SSD T5. The best way to gauge relative value among similar portable drives is to calculate the cost per gigabyte, dividing the cost of the drive in dollars by the capacity in gigabytes to see the relative per-gig price. Read the full review: Western Digital My Passport Ultra. This guide will help you make sense of all these and many more questions that arise while you're shopping for an external hard drive. Read the full review: Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt. You might sacrifice some of the ample storage space, if you don’t mind losing some, so you can set the drives up in a RAID array, so you have file backups of your files should one of the drives die. Just how much faster is it to access data stored in flash cells? Best external hard drive for a desktop PC Most external drives are small enough to be transported easily. Luckily, many external hard drives offer terabytes (TB) of storage space for not much more money. If you want to combine speed and capacity, then the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive 5TB is definitely worth considering. Typically, iStorage hard disks cater best to governments and multinational organizations around the world, for good reason too – they offer tight security like no other drives around. (Image Credit: Samsung). Best overall: Samsung T5; Best lightweight: SanDisk Extreme Pro; Toughest: Adata SE800; Best budget hard drive: Western Digital My Passport Ultra They're mostly intended for professional use in editing studios, surveillance control rooms, and the like. That’s certainly good enough for most users. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time. If the drive only includes a single cable, you may need an adapter, depending on your computer's available USB ports. Data protected by password and AES-256 hardware encryption. A metal-skinned gem of a platter hard drive, the LaCie Mobile Drive looks great and performs on point. Unlike other external hard drives that come with the time-consuming process of setup, this one comes with easy to use setup. Designed for videographers and other creative pros who regularly handle tons of data, the LaCie 2big RAID combines two hot-swappable, high-capacity drives with a variety of settings for maximum flexibility and data protection. Some include SD card readers to offload footage from a camera or drone in the field, while a few specialized models have built-in Wi-Fi and can double as an all-in-one home media server, able to connect to more than one device at a time. Here, in this article, we would like to draw your attention to the high performing external hard drives which have the capacity to store up to 8TB. It comes in a range of sizes up to 8TB and it beats the competition when it comes to read and write speeds as well. At list price, the 5TB version has a higher cost per gigabyte than the 4TB version. Best All Around External Hard Drive 2021; Best External Hard Drive 2021:Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB ; Best High Performance External Hard Drive; Best ssd for gaming 2021:Samsung T5 Portable SSD; Best High Capacity External HDD 2021; Best external ssd 2021:Seagate Backup Plus Hub 10TB Read our full review: iStorage diskAshur 2. The storage space of 8TB allows you to save and create your gaming console. Check out our top-rated SSDs, along with detailed … Sign up to get breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more, plus the hottest tech deals! How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is second only to the type of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data. WD My Passport 4TB: Best external backup drive [amazon.com] SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD: Best external performance drive And, they’ll do it at a reasonable price. The only 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 better reserved for items like keyboards and mice. If you'd rather have an external hard drive that takes advantage of solid state drive (SSD) speeds, then the Samsung Portable SSD T5 is certainly among the best external hard drive for you. The iStorage diskAshur 2TB offer tight security like no other drives around. You'll also need to ensure your PC or laptop also has a USB Type-C port. For documents, music, and a little light gaming, a 2TB hard drive is perfect, but storage needs can bubble in no time if you’re a heavier user, especially when you add 4K video to your bottomless nests of folders. 6 Best Desktop External Hard Drives - December 2020 Results are Based on. These features combined make the Toshiba Canvio one of the best external hard drives on the market to consider. The Best External Hard Drives for 2020 Laptop hard drive almost full? The largest desktop drives are often much, much bulkier than the first two categories, so big that you'll want to stick them under your desk or in a dedicated server closet. Depending on which RAID level you choose, you can prioritize capacity, speed, or data redundancy, or some combination thereof. Picking up one of the best external hard drives is becoming a vital part of both a PC gamers arsenal and that of a console owner. https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-external-hard-drives. 1. If you're looking for the absolute largest capacity external hard drive, then the WD My Book Duo 4TB is the one to get, offering a sizeable 4TB (you can also get versions with up to 20TB) of storage space over two hard drives. You don't want to buy an external hard drive that's too small, end up running out of space and buying another one. NY 10036. LaCie Rugged USB-C 4TB External Hard Drive, Considering a USB Type-C hard drive? This one, though, is optimal for a desktop workspace and is … If you want a drive for additional storage, our list of best external hard drives should be your next reading assignment. Essentially it allows you to unlock the drive to get to your files quickly and easily by tapping the supplied NFC card onto the drive's body. Sign up for What's New Now to get our top stories delivered to your inbox every morning. And of course, if you're carrying your drive around with you, you want it to look nice. Almost every recent drive we have reviewed supports USB, and the same goes for laptops and desktops. The design, for one, has been overhauled and no longer resembles the My Passport Ultra or My Passport for Mac. If you need more space, you’ll need to look at desktop drives. This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Perhaps the only thing you don't need to pay all that much attention to is the warranty. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology. External SSDs offer at least twice that speed and sometimes much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps. The Armor A60 is shockproof and splashproof as well with a cable-carry design for easy cable storage. Even if we had mixed feelings on past versions of the My Passport Wireless, the 2016 “pro” variant of the external HDD restores faith in the Western Digital name. In some circumstances, this can be panic-inducing because a lack of space can prevent you from creating or saving new files. Some models include plastic bumpers, and some even meet military standards for shock and dust protection. The best external hard drives at a glance. The compact and versatile design of this Toshiba drive allows for the reduction of desk clutter. PCMag, PCMag.com and PC Magazine are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis, LLC and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. The best external hard drives, on the other hand, have a lot more space and are designed for external use, so you can take all your large important files wherever you go and access them anytime, anywhere. Buying guide for best external hard drives. If you have a large media-file collection—perhaps you are a photo or video editor, or maybe a movie buff—you'll likely need several terabytes of space in which to store it. However, if you’re dealing with large files – such as high-resolution photos and videos – in your typical workload, you should consider buying one with a bigger storage space. ... Toshiba Canvio 6 TB External Desktop Hard Drive. LaCie’s rugged external hard drives are a favorite among content creators who are always out on the field. Please deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our subscription offer, We've listed the best external hard drives money can buy, The Buffalo's MiniStation Extreme NFC is great for budget consumers. Most are roughly 5 inches tall and 2 inches wide. Follow him on Twitter @branttom. Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. The Adata SD700 will suit those looking for a rugged storage device that can provide ample capacity without costing too much. Buying the best external hard drive for your needs involves figuring out how much space you need. Portable SSD drives and secured drives may have the advantage of being more durable, faster, and better at protecting your files, but these traditional drives win when it comes to affordability. You'll only see the speed benefits of Thunderbolt 3, however, if you have a drive that's SSD-based, or a multi-drive, platter-based desktop hard drive set up in a RAID array. He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. Keep an eye on your inbox! (Image Credit: WD), The Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt is great for a device with a Thunderbolt port. Please anyone with an eye for style in their gadgets the hands-on review: Adata will! 95 % for the first year.View Deal ” and 3.5 ” SATA,... Compact and versatile design of this Toshiba drive allows for the first year.View Deal and rugged, you... The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the of. And desktops one of the traits and strengths of each RAID level choose! 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