Everyone can use some extra room for photos, videos, and game playing, but no one should ever pay full price for it. Score some serious savings on storage at our fave summer sales event.
Buying the best-value external hard drive or SSD is, strictly speaking, a numbers game. The biggest numbers in play? The first is the price you pay on any given day for the drive you’re considering. Since Amazon Prime Day 2024 is nearly upon us, it’s one of the best times of the summer, let alone the year, to make your purchase.
The second number to look out for is the capacity of the drive, in gigabytes. Simple math will tell you how much you’re paying per gigabyte, which is an excellent yardstick for measuring whether a drive is a scorcher of a deal or a just “meh” one.
Those are not the only numbers to know, though. Also look at the length of the warranty for any drive you’re eyeing. Plus—and here’s where yours truly, the PCMag experts, come in—check out formal speed-test numbers from reputable third-party review sites. We’ll toot our horn: We test dozens of external drives every year, both classic platter-based hard drives and speedy, compact solid-state models. A low cost per gigabyte, plus a warranty plan you can live with and a speed rating high enough for the kinds of stuff you store, together add up to the right external drive for your laptop or desktop.
Deals on external storage move whip-fast in and out of “good deal” and “great deal” territory—the very best ones don’t stick around for long. That’s because everybody loves more gigabytes. Here are some of the best deals we’ve seen pre-Prime Day on the top drives we’ve tested. (See also plenty of other deals you can land before the main event.
