Even a dollar or two a month adds up, especially assuming you'll only need more and more storage through the years. At least, that's the case until you look at the fees. With all of the cloud storage options available today, hard drives might seem like they're on the verge of becoming a thing of the past. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. You don’t have to use these of course, but if you’re transferring something private and want to make sure if you lose the drive people can’t access it, then these are extremely useful.ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping.
Security: Your data is important, so a drive offering simple password encryption and other security features is a major bonus.Drives have to reserve a certain amount of space for formatting and other important processes-for example, a 1TB drive may only make 920~GB available to you. But something you should be aware of is that what it says on the store page isn’t necessarily how much storage you’ll have access to. It probably won’t surprise you to learn the price goes up with how much storage a drive has. Storage: How much storage do you really need in an external drive? 500GB? 1TB? 5TB? 36TB? There are drives on this list that can offer all of those capacities and more.Different sizes have different use cases, basically, so you’ll want to consider how the drive’s size affects what you want to do with it. Some are, sure, but others are so large you’ll barely ever remove them from your desk. Size: External drives are extremely popular for their portability, but that doesn’t mean every drive is pocket-sized.Just because it’s an SSD doesn’t mean it will be a particularly fast one, so we’ll make sure to let you know the speeds of all the drives on this list.
HDDs use physical, analog discs to read and write data and are the slowest of the lot for it, but they’re also significantly more affordable. ✓ Extremely durable against impacts, dust, and waterĭrive Type: There are three main types of hard drives to pick from: Hard Disk Drives (or HDDs), Solid-State Drives (or SSDs), and Non-Volatile Memory Express SSDs (or NVMes for short).
The LaCrie Rugged drives protect against both physical and digital threats excellently.įor Mac users, this Thunderbolt 3 drive delivers blistering fast speeds and premium build quality. If you need a lot of storage, then the My Book is happy to comply. This HDD may be slower than its SSD counterparts, but it's much more affordable. Fast NVMe speeds with a durable, portable design.Ī drive small enough to fit on a keychain while still providing the specs of larger drives.