Whether you’re after an external HDD or SSD, we’ve rounded up a collection of the best cheap external hard drive deals to suit just about any need and budget.
Data storage is cheaper per gigabyte than ever, so if you’re not too keen on trusting your digital goodies to an online cloud storage service (which is just someone else’s computer, if we’re being honest), then an external hard drive is what you need. Today’s external HDDs are speedy, reliable, and come in pretty much all shapes and sizes, from large desktop RAID arrays to pocket-sized portable SSDs. Whatever you’re looking for, though, we’ve got it right here in this complete roundup of the best cheap external hard drive deals of the month: The first two steps of choosing an external hard drive are setting your budget and determining what size you need. As cheap as storage is per gigabyte in 2020, the classic trade-off of hard drive size versus portability still holds; basically, is your primary consideration storage space or physical size? If your external hard drive is for home and office use at a single workstation and will more or less sit in one place, then storage space is more valuable than mobility. If, on the other hand, you’re frequently ferrying data around from one PC to the next, then a portable hard drive might be a better choice, even if you’re sacrificing some storage space for a smaller footprint. What exactly you are using your hard drive for will also factor into your purchase decision. If your external HDD or SSD is just for file storage, then this is rather simple, but if you’re going to be regularly reading and writing to your external storage (for example, doing video editing right from the drive itself rather than from your computer’s system drive), you’ll want to be sure you get something that has good read and write speeds and that uses up-to-date connectivity standards such as USB 3.0. For more details about external hard drive designs and features to look for when making your purchase decision, read on.
