Best external drives 2023: Backup, storage, and portability

Price When Reviewed:

1TB:$79.99 I 2TB:$129.99 I 4TB:$239.99

Not everyone wants or even needs 20Gbps USB drive performance, which comes at a price premium anyway. The Crucial X9 strikes a compelling balance between top-shelf performance and affordability that should please the majority of users. In our benchmark tests, it traded top scores with the SK Hynix Beetle (or runner-up choice below), but at a significantly lower cost. Making it an indisputable win-win for consumers.

It’s also handsome, described by our reviewer as “a svelte object of desire.” More importantly, it feels well made, and is rated for IP55 dust and spray resistance, so you don’t have to baby this portable drive when you take it out.

Price When Reviewed:

512GB: $71.06 I 1TB: $92.69

As stated above, the SK Hynix Beetle X31 is every bit the performer as our top pick in the 10Gbps realm, with the two enjoying an equal number of wins in our benchmarks and handily besting the competition. But where the SK Hynix loses its edge is on price. Right now, it’s about $13 more for 1TB than the Crucial X9.

It’s also more blinged out. Peep that gold scarab-inspired exterior. It will sit proudly on any desk, and for some buyers that might make the extra cost worth it.

Price When Reviewed:

$469

Once our top pick overall, the Samsung T7 Shield has been overtake in raw speeds by the two newcomers above. But if the 2TB limit of the drives above has you feeling too confined, the T7 Shield 4TB is a good option.

The T7 Shield also leans into physical protection, with an IP65 ratings against particulate matter and water spray. Going hiking with your data? A T7 Shield is a good choice, and you can secure it with software-based password protection in lieu of a fingerprint.

With its top-tier speeds and large capacity, the T7 4TB model is capable of handling the largest end-user data sets on the go.

Price When Reviewed:

500GB: $69.99 I 1TB: $109.99 I 2TB: $99.99 I 4TB: $179.99

Price When Reviewed:

1TB: $119.99 I 2TB: $169.99

If you’ve got a 20Gbps USB port, you can’t get better performance than this drive (short of a much pricier Thunderbolt option). This makes it perfect for gaming—where these days a single game can soak up 50GB or 100GB—or really any job involving large amounts of data that need to be transferred fast.

The Crucial X10 was most impressive in our real-world benchmarks, doing exceptionally well in 48GB and 450GB reads and writes, where it beat all 20Gbps contenders and was surprisingly neck-and-neck with a Thunderbolt 3 competitor. (Learn more about how we evaluate the best external SSD for gaming.)

Price When Reviewed:

2TB: $190 I 4TB: $350 I 8TB: $650

Sometimes you just need space, a lot of space. Maybe you’re a video editor or creative professional who needs to store massive media files. Or maybe you just have the world’s largest library of cat videos. No judgment. Either way, you need the Samsung T5 EVO. This rugged bad boy comes with a whopping 8TB of storage space. You read that right — 8 terabytes. That should be enough no matter your needs, feline or otherwise.

The T5 EVO has an attractive design with a rugged silicon-like exterior that is rated up to an impressive 1500Gs. It isn’t the fastest drive since it uses USB 3.2 (Gen 1), which means data transfer rates will be capped at 550MBps. But the T5 EVO is all about capacity rather than stellar performance anyways. For affordable capacity from a trustworthy brand, the Samsung T5 EVO should be your go-to.

Price When Reviewed:

$40 for 256GB | $58 for 512GB | $260 for 2TB | $300 for 4TB

Rated for 20Gbps and selling for $90 with 1TB of storage, the Teamgroup M200 is an attractive (in a military fashion) external drive for the budget-conscious performance enthusiast.

It might not be as cheap as the Crucial X6, but for the extra outlay you get outstanding everyday performance — in many tests, 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 also extremely portable and its slick styling will appeal to gamers.

Price When Reviewed:

$79.99 for 500GB I $129.99 for 1TB

No external SSD we’ve seen can match Adata’s Elite SE880 for portability. Indeed, measuring only 2.55 inches long, 1.38 inches wide, and 0.48 inches thick, it reminds you more of a USB thumb drive than your standard external SSD. It also weighs a mere 1.1 ounces, so it vanishes from your consciousness in the pocket.

In real-world 48GB transfer tests, the Elite SD880 beat out quite a few of its competitors, though it lost significant ground in the longer 450GB write test. Photo and video pros with large files to transfer might want to consider speedier options.

Price When Reviewed:

$75 for 500GB I $160 for 1TB I $285 for 2TB I $500 for 4TB

The Kingston XS2000 is an admirable blend of size, capacity, speed, and affordability. With up to 4TB in capacity, it is one of the most capacious drives that still fits in smaller pockets.

The XS2000 is a 20Gbps USB drive, and while it lagged as a reader compared to most of the 20Gbps competition, it beats the pants off of the 10Gbps drives in synthetic benchmarks and our 48GB transfers. The 450GB write was very slow, but overall, it’s a decently fast SSD and a solid product that offers a ton of storage in a very small form factor.

Note: Kingston sent us a updated version that solved its slow read performance in synthetic benchmarks. The 450GB write remained slow.

Price When Reviewed:

1TB: $160 I 2TB: $240 I 4TB: $400

For anyone who wants Thunderbolt’s scintillating 40Gbps performance as well as the ability to connect via ubiquitous USB (10Gbps), the SanDisk Pro-G40 is the drive to buy — it’s the fastest dual-bus drive that we’ve ever tested. The drive dominated the competition when connected via Thunderbolt with outstanding 48GB and 450GB transfers, and via USB was on par with the fastest 10Gbps drives.

The Pro-G40 is also rated at IP68 for weather and dust resistance, meaning it should be able to handle outdoor adventures if you decide to travel with it in your backpack. It’s a rather pricey drive, but Thunderbolt drives are never “cheap.” They are, however, absolutely worth it if pennies don’t matter as much as minutes. A fantastic drive.

Price When Reviewed:

$139.99

HDDs (hard disk drives) have been around for more than 50 years. They are essentially boxes containing spinning platters with read/write arms that skim across them to detect the orientation of, or re-align particles in, the magnetic material that coats the platters. 

SSDs (solid state drives), on the other hand, use flash memory and have no moving parts inside the drive. Data is instead stored in cells—aka, voltage traps—which are interconnected in a matrix. The matrix approach allows for data to be pushed or pulled to/from many different places at once and significantly increases both read and write speed—on the order of 100 times faster these days.

Generally speaking, SSDs are a better bet for your external drives due to their smaller size, faster speeds, and far superior ruggedness and durability. The main drawback to SSDs is that you pay quite a bit more per terabyte of storage. As technology and production techniques improve, the price of SSDs has and will continue to drop.

Ideally, you should backup your data as often as possible. This is especially true if you are working on an important project or have data that you absolutely cannot afford to lose. 

If you have your external hard drive connected to your computer at all times, it is a good idea to automate the backup process and have the drive back up your data every hour or so. If you disconnect or travel with your external hard drive, you should try to remember to back up your data onto it every time you change your data or at least every day. See our roundups of the best Windows backup software and the best online backup services to learn more.

This comes down to the perceived size of storage (KB, MB, GB, TB) versus the actual size of that storage. Most consumers are led to believe that a Kilobyte (KB) is 1,000 bytes when it is actually 1,024 bytes. Most consumers then are led to believe that a Megabyte (MB) is 1,000 KB when it is actually 1,024 KB. So a manufacturer’s hard drive that claims to have 1 TB of storage actually has only 931.31 GB of storage. It is essentially a rounding error that manufacturers neglect to advertise because round numbers are easier to understand. 

Another reason that actual storage may appear less than advertised is that hard drives have to be formatted to read and write data properly. When formatting, a portion of the storage space on the drive is allocated in order to catalog the data.

The average lifespan of an external hard drive is about three to five years. However, this is highly dependent upon the make and model and the conditions of usage and storage. The more you use an external hard drive, the less reliable it becomes. 

One way to guesstimate the lifespan of your hard drive is to look at the manufacturer’s warranty and the TBW (total terabytes written) number. You can determine the estimated daily amount of storage you write and then extrapolate from there to see how long you can continue to use it everyday until you reach the TBW. These numbers are not entirely reliable, and drives can last much longer than these two values, but they give an idea as to when you will likely begin to encounter issues.