Best External Storage Drive Portable Drive Is

Not only is it faster to read and write data stored in flash cells, but its also safer.

We may earn affiliate commissions from buying links, which help support our testing.

Our deep-dive reviews will get you on track to the right external hard drive.

The 8TB version of the Western Digital My Book is a deep well of affordable storage for your photos, music, videos, and more.

Its brawny, but the ADATA HD830 offers superior protection and value for the money in a rugged external platter-based drive.

LaCies two-drive Rugged RAID Shuttle offers the choice of high capacity and fast performance (in striped mode), or of half the capacity with all data mirrored on the second disk.

Its ideal for anyone who works in the field and produces oodles of data.

A metal-skinned gem of a platter hard drive, the LaCie Mobile Drive looks great and performs on point.

Best External Storage Drive Portable Drive Is

Combining on-point performance and strong encryption, Seagates Backup Plus Ultra Touch portable drive is a great choice for everyday backups and security-first use alike.

Its combination of solid performance, hardware encryption, and useful utilities makes the 5TB WD My Passport a strong contender for everyday backup of sensitive data or storing a massive collection of videos, photos, and documents.

Love or hate its camouflage look, the ADATA HD710M Pro external rugged hard drive provides on-par performance and fine durability at a competitive price.

The rough-and-tumble Armor ATD, G-Technologys latest ruggedized hard drive, performs on point and packs a competitive-enough cost per gigabyte to brawl and fall with competitors.

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.

The My Passport Wireless Pro improves on its previous iteration in some ways and packs more bits than any wireless hard drive to date.

But modern ones are faster, more stylish, and often more durable than their counterparts from a few years ago.

For about 50, you can add a terabyte of extra storage to your laptop or desktop by just plugging in a USB cable.

The drive capacity is the most important factor to consider, and it can increase or decrease the cost dramatically depending on your needs.

This guide will help you make sense of all these and many more questions that arise while youre 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 by far, but first you 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 data.

Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cellssimilar to the ones that make up a computers RAMto save data.

External SSDs offer at least twice that speed and sometimes much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps.

Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature-length film, or a years worth of family photos) to an external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning drive.

Best External Storage Drive For Mac