Chances are that you have important data that you don’t want to use on your PC. To protect and back up your data you’ll want to either store it on the cloud or copy it to an external drive. If you don’t wish to entrust your data to a cloud service, then the best way to make sure your data isn’t lost is to save a copy onto an external drive. It’s an inexpensive and convenient way to back up your important files or store any overflow. It can also be a handy way to transport your data or even transfer files between devices.
As files get larger and you accumulate more of them, you’re all but guaranteed to continually need more storage. An external drive is one of the best ways to ensure you have enough storage capacity and to cover yourself in case of an emergency. Here at PCWorld we’ve tested numerous external drives and curated a list of the best external drives below. We’ve provided recommendations for everything from blazing-fast performance to budget options to portability and everything in between. Below our recommendations you’ll find additional helpful information on what you need to know to choose the best external drive for your needs.
Updated 06/21/2023: We’ve added the SanDisk Pro-G40 as our choice for best USB/Thunderbolt combo. This dual-bus Thunderbolt drive gives you absolutely ridiculous 40Gbps performance. Read more about our latest pick in the summary below.
Samsung T7 Shield – Best performance USB drive
Pros
Fast 1GBps sustained transfers
Excellent real world performance
Vast 4TB capacity
Svelte and handsome
Cons
Not cheap
Small 4K performance glitch under CrystalDiskMark 8 writing 4K files
We’re fans of the original Samsung T7 Shield, and now we’re ever bigger fans of the follow-up, larger capacity 4TB version of the T7 Shield. Now upgraded to a 4TB capacity from the previous 1TB and 2TB versions, Samsung has continued with their excellent track record of speed and durability with their T7 drives. Whereas the T7’s predecessor, the Samsung Touch, distinguished itself with a fingerprint reader for data security, the Shield models lean in to physical protection, with IP65 ratings against particulate matter and water spray, making them good performance drives for out in the field. (Mind you, the Shield can still be secured with password protection.)
While the 4TB model is capable of handling the largest end-user data sets, it is also a bit pricey. Thankfully, if you don’t need so much storage, you can simply purchase our previous best pick 1TB or 2TB versions for less. Regardless of the size, all T7 Shields boast USB 3.2 10Gbps implementation allowing for 10Gbps transfer speeds which gives it the edge over many other external drives on the market today.
Read our full
Samsung T7 4TB review
SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD – Best performance drive runner-up
Pros
Overall fastest USB SSD currently available
Relatively affordable
IP55 rated against dust and mild streams of water
Cons
Slightly slower reading files than Samsung’s T7
While we’ve moved SanDisk’s Extreme Pro Portable SSD (1TB) to runner-up status in light of the Samsung T7’s improved write speeds, make no mistake, it’s still one the fastest USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) external SSD we’ve tested to date. It’s slightly more expensive than the T7 Shield, at $190 for 1GB and $300 for 2GB, and it’s rated at IP55 for slightly less protection from the elements. But both are excellent performers.
Note: There are faster USB 3.2 2×2 (also known as SuperSpeed 20Gbps) SSDs available, such as the WD Black P50 and Seagate Barracuda Fast SSD. However, SuperSpeed 20Gbps and USB4 ports are still so rare, we’re not sure it matters. Those drives are also just not as svelte as the Extreme Pro.
Read our full
SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD review
WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD (1TB) – Best for gaming
Pros
Up to 2GBps with SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps
Distinctively militaristic styling
Cons
Pricey compared to SuperSpeed 10Gbps drives
Requires the extremely rare SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps port for full performance
Today’s games can soak up 50GB or 100GB of storage and more. If you’re looking for a drive to quickly load that game from on your gaming laptop, we recommend WD’s Black P50 Game Drive. And no, not just because it’s literally called “Game Drive,” but because we prefer game’s to be launched from an SSD where it can literally be a competitive advantage in some titles. Running an external SSD for your games also means far, far faster level loads, too, compared to a plodding hard drive. While many PCs don’t have the USB SuperSpeed 20Gbps ports needed to make the Black P50 sing, it’s actually becoming fairly standard in newer desktops. The good news is, even running a game at USB 10Gbps speeds means reads and writes up to 1,000MBps, which is still a huge improvement over a hard drive. (Learn more about how we evaluate the best external SSD for gaming.)
Read our full
WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD (1TB) review
Crucial X6 Portable SSD (2TB) – Best budget option
Pros
Ergonomic design
Good everyday performance
Very affordable for an external SSD
Cons
Performance tanks when cache runs out
The Crucial X6 Portable SSD is square to be hip. Or placed in your hip pocket, at any rate. In a sea of portable SSDs whose shape makes them a literal pain when pocketed, the thin, rounded-edge X6 is a sigh of relief. It’s not state-of-the-art fast, but it’s fast enough for most users and extremely affordable.
Read our full
Crucial X6 Portable SSD (2TB) review
Teamgroup M200 – Best budget speedster
Pros
Fast everyday performance
Available in up to 8TB (eventually) capacity
Attractively styled
Cons
No TBW rating
Company will change components if shortages demand
Writes slow to 200MBps off cache
Price When Reviewed:
225 Euro
At 20Gbps and less than $100 for 1TB of storage, the Teamgroup M200 is a very attractive external drive for the budget conscious. It might not be as cheap as the Crucial X6, but for a bit more money you’ll get some outstanding everyday performance—it’s the fastest 20Gbps drive we’ve ever tested. At just 4.13-inches long and 2.18-inches wide and weighing under 3 ounces, it’s extremely portable. The slick styling will likely appeal to gamers as well.
Read our full
Teamgroup T-Force M200 20Gbps USB SSD review
Adata Elite SE880 SSD – Most portable external drive
Pros
Very fast, over-20Gbps USB connection
Extremely small form factor
5-year warranty
Cons
Slows considerably during long contiguous writes
Somewhat low TBW rating
No external SSD we’ve seen can match Adata’s Elite SE880 for portability. Indeed, measuring in at only 2.55 inches long, 1.38 inches wide, and 0.48 inches thick, it reminds you more of a USB thumb drive than a standard external SSD. It weighs a mere 1.1 ounces to boot, virtually disappearing in your pocket.
The Elite SE880 is also very fast at everyday tasks but slows down during long writes. In real-world 48GB transfer tests, the drive displayed outstanding marks, even beating out some other competitors on this list. But it lost significant ground in the longer contiguous write tests, showing that photo and video pros with large files to transfer might want to consider other options.
Read our full
Adata Elite SE880 SSD review
Kingston XS200 USB SSD – Most portable high-capacity drive
Pros
Super svelte
Good 20Gbps performance
Available in up to 4TB in capacity
Cons
Slower than much of the competition
Not much of a looker
The Kingston XS2000 is an admirable blend of size, capacity, and speed—all for a reasonable price. With up to 4TB in capacity, it is comparable to some of the largest drives on this list but it fits in your pocket.
The Kingston XS2000 also has data transfer rates of up to 20Gbps, which isn’t lightning fast, but it beats the 10Gbps of some competitors. Overall, this small, surprisingly affordable, and decently fast SSD is a solid product, especially if you plan to carry a lot of data around with you.
Read our full
Kingston XS200 USB SSD review
SanDisk Pro-G40 – Best USB/Thunderbolt combo
Pros
Both 10Gbps and Thunderbolt 3/4 connectivity
Fast, especially over Thunderbolt
IP68 weather and dust resistant
For anyone who wants the option of superfast 40Gbps performance or flexibility of either a Thunderbolt or USB connection, then the SanDisk Pro-G40 is the drive to get. In fact, it’s the single best dual-bus compatibility drive that we’ve ever tested. It provides the useful choice of optimizing speed of up to 40Gbps via Thunderbolt 3/4 or opting for power saving via 10Gbps USB. In our tests, the drive dominated the competition when connected with Thunderbolt with outstanding 48GB and 450GB transfers, far outpacing any 10Gbps USB drive.
The Pro-G40 is also rated at IP68 for weather and dust resistance, meaning it should be able to handle a few tougher outings if you decide to travel with it as well. It isn’t a cheap external drive, but then again Thunderbolt drives are never really cheap. Still, they’re absolutely worth it if you value performance above cost and the SanDisk Pro-G40 is as good of a Thunderbolt drive—let alone a dual-bus drive—as we’ve seen.
Read our full
SanDisk Pro-G40 SSD review
Samsung Portable SSD X5 – Best Thunderbolt 3 drive
Pros
Blazingly fast
Portable
Cons
Lack of AC jack makes it Thunderbolt 3 only
Expensive, though not out of whack for NVMe SSDs
If you have Thunderbolt 3 or 4 on your system, you owe it to yourself to check out a portable Thunderbolt 3 drive such as Samsung’s SSD X5. As an NVMe SSD using PCIe over a cable (that’s basically what Thunderbolt 3 is), it’s stupidly fast—over 2.5GBps reading and writing.
The only reason we don’t universally recommend the Portable SSD X5 is the relative rarity of Thunderbolt 3/4 ports on PCs. The advent of USB4 should alleviate this, but only if vendors decide to combine it with the superset technology that is Thunderbolt 4. Or you may simply soon see USB4 drives with the same 40Gbps transfer rates. It gets complicated.
Read the full review of the Samsung Portable SSD X5 in Macworld
WD My Passport 5TB – Best for backups
Pros
Excellent cost per gigabyte
Nice styling
Comprehensive software suite
Cons
Slower than average with large files
You want to know why we chose WD’s My Passport 5TB for backups? It’s right there in the name—that extra 1TB can be invaluable in the age of 4K.
Read our full
WD My Passport 5TB review
Seagate Backup Plus Portable – Best for backups runner-up
Pros
Up to 5TB in a 2.5-inch package
Affordable
Cons
Slow writing small files and folders
Like the WD above, Seagate’s Backup Plus Portable is a USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) drive—plenty enough bandwidth for the hard drive inside. Capacity tops out at 5TB, but the drive is also available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB sizes.
In our tests of the 4TB version, we found the Seagate to be slightly faster than the WD with large file transfers (think movies), but slower with small file transfers (think Office documents). All in all, a worthy runner-up.
Read our full
Seagate Backup Plus Portable review
What you need to know before you buy
Yes, USB4 will provide the same massive throughput as Thunderbolt 3 at lower prices eventually, and likely far more products too.
Capacity and price
For most consumers, the main shopping concerns for external storage are capacity and price. However, while you might think that the lowest-cost drive provides the most value, it often doesn’t. In fact, dollar for dollar, cheaper low-capacity drives are most often the worst deal historically. We’ve been doing this comparison for years and it’s always been the worst value.
You can see that below where we compare the popular WD Elements desktop hard drive’s available capacities and prices. You’re paying more than twice as much for the lowest-capacity drive versus the next step up. It’s almost equally as bad on the WD Elements Portable drive.
How much capacity do you need?
The best “value” are typically for the largest hard drives as you can see, but it brings considerably higher prices and not everyone needs that much capacity. So how much do you need? We recommend a backup drive at least twice as large as the total capacity of your PC. If you have 1TB of storage in your PC, 2TB will allow you to make a full backup while keeping historical backups on the same drive. Having more storage allows you to keep more historical files should you need them or use the same drive to backup additional PCs.
While the desktop drive provides a far higher capacity, they also require more cables, weigh more, and generally may not be quite as shock resistant as a portable hard drive that’s designed to take a few more bumps, even when on.
The worst value for an external hard drive is typically the lowest-capacity drive.
IDG
Interface
The vast majority of external drives today are USB drives. Beyond that simple statement, the story gets confusing—largely because of the plethora of variations: USB 3.0, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps, which is basically USB 3.0), USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps), and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20Gbps), and now the up-and-coming USB4. In an attempt to simplify things, the USB Forum has recently changed the nomenclature to indicate throughput speed—SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps, SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps, and SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps—because performance is a priority for most uses. For the sake of brevity (and sanity), we generally shorten those names to USB 10Gbps, or 10Gbps USB, for instance.
No hard drive, unless combined in RAID with others, can outstrip the 5Gbps (roughly 500MBps real-world after overhead) throughput of USB 3.1 Gen 1. Don’t worry about Gen 2, 10Gbps, or Thunderbolt with single hard drive enclosures because it doesn’t really matter.
Where SuperSpeed 10Gbps/20Gbps, USB4, or Thunderbolt will definitely help is with the aforementioned RAID hard drive setups, or more likely—an SSD. The good news is that while USB 3.1 Gen 2, which is more than fast enough for most users at 10Gbps, used to be expensive, it’s basically the standard today. A SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, our runner-up for portable storage, can be had for $90 in a 500GB capacity.
The faster USB 3.2 SuperSpeed 20Gbps (Gen 2×2) moves you into a higher-price bracket, with the Seagate Firecuda Gaming SSD costing $200 for the same 500GB of storage. Although faster than the typical USB 3.2 SuperSpeed 10Gbps, there aren’t a lot of USB 20Gbps gen 2×2 ports out there, but these drives should work with the upcoming USB4 at the same 20Gbps pace.
Thunderbolt 3 and the newer Thunderbolt 4 typically are the highest-performing interfaces for external storage, with the key limitation being a premium price and a general lack of compatibility with the far more popular USB 3.2 ports in the world. Still, if you want the most performance, you can get it in drives such as our recommended portable, the Samsung Portable SSD X5, which is $200 for 500GB of capacity. For comparison, a slower 1TB Samsung T5 on USB is only $125.
The top drive uses the older, slower Mini-USB interface. The second drive features the connector that replaced it: Micro B SuperSpeed. The Orange drive features both a SuperSpeed Micro B and Thunderbolt 2 (mini DisplayPort connector). The bottom drive features USB-C or USB Type C.
Ports
External drives come with a variety of ports, though they’re gradually consolidating on the Type-C connector. Here’s what you need to care about:
USB 3 Micro-B Superspeed. This is still a very common port on many lower-cost portable and desktop external hard drives today. It’s actually the same Micro USB port used on your phone, but beefed up with more data lines to hit USB 3.0 speeds. It’ll do 5Gbps and is fine for hard drives and SATA (internally) SSDs.
USB 3 Type-B is the larger, blocky version of USB 3.0 Micro B. Type B ports are becoming rare, though you might find one on enclosures supporting 5.25-inch hard drives or optical drives. It supports speeds up to 5Gbps.
USB-C is the latest of the USB connectors the world is coalescing around. You see it in everything from phones to laptops. Keep in mind, USB-C refers only to the connector itself. What is carried over the wires varies greatly. For example, for data transfers from an external drive, a USB-C port could mean everything from USB 2.0 High Speed (480Mbps) to USB 3.2 SuperSpeed 20Gbps as well as USB4 and Thunderbolt 3. Any higher performance port today should be USB-C—just remember that just because it’s USB-C doesn’t mean the actual electronics inside the PC or drive can hit the highest speeds of what a USB-C port can do.
USB Type-A You won’t find this port on any drive, but you will find this familiar rectangular port on PCs and laptops. The reason we mention it is that any drive with a Type-C port should come with a Type-C to Type-A cable or adapter, hopefully, since most PCs have those.
Thunderbolt 2 is at this point, a dead port. Using the mini-DisplayPort connector, it only really gained popularity on Macs, and even Apple put it out to pasture in 2017. There’s no need to invest in a Thunderbolt 2 drive unless it’s for legacy support issues.
Note that Apple makes a bi-directional Thunderbolt 1/2 to 3 adapter if you need to connect the one to the other. It does not transfer power, however, so you can’t use it on its own with bus-powered external drives. You’ll need a powered dock for that.
eSATA is another legacy port that’s basically disappeared. Created for attaching external storage to your computer’s SATA bus, eSATA was a cheap way in its day to get beyond the 60MBps performance of USB 2.0. USB 3.0 put the last nail in its coffin. As with Thunderbolt 2, the only reason to invest in an eSATA drive is for use with older computers.
A second drive as backup?
In backup, there’s a fundamental maxim appropriately named the Rule of Three. It states that you should always maintain three copies of your irreplaceable data: the original data, a backup, and a backup of the backup. Preferably, the two backups are kept in separate locations, one being offsite. Keeping a copy online is great for smaller amounts of data and certainly meets the offsite criteria. However, for vast photo, audio, and/or video collections, external drives in pairs (or more), are a faster, more practical solution.
Create complete backups alternately to the two drives every few months. True patrons of wisdom might even take the second drive to work, so there’s no chance of losing both drives to the same local disaster.
For more guidance on building out the best backup plan possible, see our roundups of the best cloud backup services and best Windows backup software.
Our storage testbed is a Core i7-5820K with 64GB of RAM on an Asus X99 Deluxe board. Older Asus Thunderbolt EX 3 and ATI graphics cards is shown. Currently a Gigabyte Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt card and x2 Nvidia 710 GPU card are employed.
How we tested
We use our standard storage test bed to evaluate the performance of every external drive we review. It’s a six-core (twelve-thread) Intel Core i7-5820K on an Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard with 64GB of Kingston DDR4 memory running Windows 10.
A discrete Gigabyte Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt 3 card and Ableconn USB 3.2 2×2 20Gbps card (Asmedia 2142 controller) are used for connecting the external drives. An Asus USB 3.1/10Gbps (Asmedia 1142 controller) card was employed for some of the older drives on the chart.
We run various synthetic benchmarks including Crystal Disk Mark 6/7/8, AS SSD 2, and Iometer. We also perform real-world transfer tests using a 48GB batch of small files and folders, as well as a single 48GB and 450GB files. The testbed boots from a NVMe drive, but the real-world (Windows) file transfers are performed to and from a 58GB RAM disk.
External drive FAQ
1.
What is the difference between an SSD and an HDD?
HDDs (hard disk drives) have been around for more than 50 years and rely on spinning disks to read and write data. They are essentially composed of spinning metal platters with magnetic coatings where the data is stored and a read/write arm that moves across the platters to access the data.
SSDs (solid state drives), on the other hand, use flash memory and have no moving parts inside the drive. Data is instead stored on flash memory microchips which are interconnected with one another. This interconnectedness allows for data to be pulled from many different places at once and significantly increases memory read speeds.
Generally speaking, SSDs will be a better bet for an external drive due to their smaller size, faster speeds, and overall durability. The main drawback to SSDs is that you will pay more money for the same storage capacity as HDDs. As technology improves however, the price of SSDs will continue to drop.
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