Give your files a safe home with our pick of the best external hard drives, rated for value, size and portability.
The best external hard drives will save you money. Instead of paying for expensive upgrades to that new laptop, or splurging on those pricier portable SSD drives and secured drives, grab one of these hard drives for a way to save and protect your files without dropping too much cash. They’re perfect backup solutions not just for personal but business use as well. If value is important to you, you’ll get quite a bit with the best external hard drives. You’ll end up with more space for cheaper and, while these HDDs won’t be quite as fast or rugged as external SSDs, they’re a great compromise between practicality and price. Of course, with one of these, you’ll be able to access your most important files anywhere you are. It’s true that USB flash drives and microSD memory cards offer a little bit of extra space to carry around, but they just won’t do for business use. Which is why the best external hard drives are such a great option for businesses. If external SSDs are just too expensive and you want to expand your storage space, the best external hard drives will cover you as well as keep your files secure. And, they’ll do it at a reasonable price. Read on to see our picks for the best HDDs. If you’re looking for the best external hard drive that will save you a ton of cash, Buffalo’s MiniStation Extreme NFC could be your match made in heaven. With compatibility for both Mac and Windows machines, the Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC is very flexible, and comes with a rugged case that’s dust and water resistant, along with a built-in USB 3.0 cable. Not only is your data kept protected from knocks and drops with the rugged shell, but it’s also got 256-bit AES security features and NFC (Near Field Communication) features as well. 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. Pretty neat! Read the full review: Buffalo MiniStation Extreme 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. It features cloud storage and 256-AES encryption, along with WD’s own software suite. It is a good performer when it comes to data transfer speeds but doesn’t come near the top of the leaderboard. 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. Read the full review: Western Digital My Passport Ultra 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. 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. Of course, it’s also backwards compatible with USB 3.
