Best external drives 2024: Backup, storage, and portability

Price When Reviewed:

1TB:$109.99 I 2TB:$179.99 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 (our 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:

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

Price When Reviewed:

512GB: $80 I 1TB: $100

There’s something to be said for the thumb drive form factor. It’s eminently portable, being both small and eschewing the necessity of a connector cable. It’s also versatile as it can slot into the ubiquitous USB-A port.

The SK Hynix Tube T31 combines all that thumb-drive convenience with SSD performance, for the best of the both worlds.

With 10Gbps NVMe storage, the wee Tube T31 performs like a cable-attached SSD, and definitively outperformed other thumb drives in its class. And while it’s priced relatively high compared to a standard thumb drive, it’s priced competitively for its performance.

There’s no better option if fast and cable-free storage is what you’re after.

Price When Reviewed:

1TB: $129.99

Let’s face it, the competition is very close in the top tier of 20Gbps external drives, with name-brand contenders trading wins up and down the benchmark charts. Nevertheless, a winner is a winner, and cumulatively, the Lexar nudged out our previous champ, Crucial’s X10 Pro, even if only by a hair.

The upshot is that you can expect excellent performance from the Lexar SL600. On top of that, it comes in a uniquely shaped form factor, complete with an opening to accommodate a lanyard, if that’s how you roll. You can even take the highly portable drive’s design a step further by opting for the SL660 variant that comes with RGB lighting around its miniature handle. The drive comes with the standard five year warranty.

When performance is this closely matched among products, the determining factor should be price. And in that respect, too, the SL600 is neck-and-neck with the Crucial X10 Pro, and priced slightly to significantly cheaper than some of its competitors, at least as of this writing — particularly at the 2TB level.

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:

$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:

$49.99 for dock I $159.99 w/1TB Mag I $219.99 w/2TB I $339.99 w/4TB

The SanDisk Pro-Blade Transport is a portable SSD dock that can be thought of as a cross between removable media and high-speed NVMe. It comes with easy-to-use removable storage cartridges for fast rotating backup. Additionally, it’s a good way to organize projects by their own media as well. The SanDisk Pro-Blade Transport’s modular design allows users to expand their TB count over the same connection and keep everything together and organized in neat, handsome cartridges.

The cartridges come in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities and are all capable of transferring at speeds of 20Gbps. In our speed tests, the Pro-Blade’s cartridges did well in both synthetic benchmarks as well as real-world transfers, with good sustained speeds throughout both the shorter 48GB and longer 450GB read/write tests. We did notice a few hiccups though when the drive’s system would lock up and we needed to manually reboot it to fix the issue. These only came about during rigorous testing scenarios and aren’t likely to affect day-to-day usage. Also, this is something that SanDisk should be able to fix with a software update and it wasn’t a major issue anyways. Overall, this sleek storage system is a great option for organizing your storage and for those who need ultimate flexibility.

Price When Reviewed:

1TB: $219.99 I 2TB: $299.99 I 4TB: $529.99 I 8TB: $1,299.99

Sure the SanDisk Pro-G40 is a fast, dual USB/Thunderbolt drive, but the OWC Express 1M2 takes fast USB transfers to a whole new level with USB4. The new USB4 technology allows for blazing-fast data transfer rates up to a maximum of 40Gbps — the same as Thunderbolt 4. And the OWC Express proves it. In our tests, it was the fastest external drive over every bus: Thunderbolt 4, 20Gbps USB, and 10Gbps USB. So no matter what you choose to use, the 1M2 is the ultimate drive for speed.

The drive itself looks very much like a giant silver heatsink (the pink hue is the result of lighting) and feels quite large and hefty compared to some of the other drives on this list. We don’t mind it as the whole design makes the drive feel like it means business, but it doesn’t make the 1M2 the most portable external SSD either. Regardless, the OWC Express 1M2 is currently one of the absolute fastest external drives around if you’re feeling the need for speed.

Pros

• Available in large 4TB and 8TB capacities
• Good 10Gbps performer
• Attractive and unusual, if somewhat large, heat-shedding design

Price When Reviewed:

4TB: $250 I 8TB: $700

As the name suggests, the SanDisk Desk Drive isn’t meant to be portable, unlike many of the external drives on this list. It’s not only to bulky for a pocket, or even a laptop bag, but it also requires an AC adapter.

But that doesn’t detract from its utility, because the Desk Drive is really best suited for backups. That’s evident in the fact that it only comes in 4GB and 8GB capacities, priced competitively at $250 and $700 respectively.

Granted, that’s a lot more per-gigabyte than you’d pay for a backup hard drive. But with the Desk Drive you get brisk 10Gbps performance, and the assurance that comes from an SSD’s lack of moving parts. In other words, the price-per-performance makes it a wash with an HDD.

Price When Reviewed:

2TB: $85 I 4TB: $135 I 5TB: $150 I 6TB: $185

We can forgive the cumbersome name, and the fact that this drive, misleadingly, doesn’t actually use a USB-C connector, because there are other more substantial ways that it pleases us.

For starters, the WD My Passport, Works with USB-C offers a ton of capacity — up to 6TB — and at a far more affordable price per terabyte than one can get from an SSD (around $30/TB versus twice that for the latter). This makes the WD My Passport a natural fit for backup needs, particularly since those can be timed during off hours, mitigating the need for an SSDs superior speeds.

As for the misleading moniker, the My Passport does indeed work with USB-C, but it’s by way of the drive’s standard SuperSpeed Micro-B port, using the included Micro-B to Type-A cable and a bundled Type-A to USB-C adapter. Mind you, WD’s My Passport Ultra series, which actually do feature a USB-C port, don’t perform any faster than this drive, and even cost a bit more.

In fact, among all the 2.5 inch HDDs we’ve tested, the My Passport performs on par with the best of them, while being the best deal. If it’s a portable, high-capacity hard drive that you’re after, this is the one to pick.

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.