Having one of the best external hard drives for your PC is extremely useful. While they're often a little more expensive than internal drives, a good external HDD gives you loads of flexibility in terms of how you store and manage your games and files. Not only that, you can also get more storage after you've run out of slots inside your computer, because most hard drives simply connect via a USB or USB-C cable, and draw power from your gaming PC itself. If you have a gaming laptop, an external drive is essential, as most don't let you add internal storage, and often have quite small SSDs pre-installed.
What makes for the best external hard drive for you really depends on how you'll be using your HDD. If it's just about expanding the storage you already have, and you're looking for as much space as possible as a desktop solution, then getting the biggest drive possible is a priority. You don't need anything rugged, and because you'll be keeping it on your desk, you can probably consider something that needs an external power supply. Anyone looking for a little more portability can just pick up a regular 2-4TB drive, as they can withstand a few bumps and shakes inside a rucksack or similar. Finally, there are portable SSDs too, but they're far more expensive. We have a handful in the list below, and advice on how to craft your own to keep the cost down.
This is the best portable SSD in our eyes, and the best external hard drive you can get. For the power user who wants it all—speed, capacity, and portability—and is willing to pay a premium for it, Samsung’s Portable SSD T5 is one of the slickest solutions out there. It’s faster than any USB flash drive available, it has the capacity of a hard drive, and you can carry it inconspicuously in your pocket. This spunky little drive shares the same DNA as Samsung’s 860 Evo SSD, just in a smaller package. It has a USB 3.1 Type-C connector, giving a maximum theoretical throughput of 10Gbps. We pitted it against a 512GB Samsung SM951 NVMe SSD connected over Gigabit Ethernet. The T5 ran the table in all eight CrystalDiskMark benchmarks and proved significantly faster in reading and writing game files and large files.
Speed doesn’t come at the expense of storage space. While it’s easy to bump into the storage ceiling of a 32GB, 64GB, or even a 128GB USB flash drive, you’ll find there’s much more breathing room when dealing with terabytes of space, which is what the T5 offers. Whereas the first generation T1 topped out at 1TB, Samsung was able to double the maximum capacity of the T5 to 2TB, a result of upgrading from 32 to 48 stacked layers of V-NAND flash memory cells for a denser configuration.
We like WD’s My Passport. It’s not as compact and fast as Samsung’s T5, and it can’t withstand armageddon like LaCie’s XtremKey, but it offers copious storage space at good value. We also like that WD (aka Western Digital) fares well each time cloud backup provider Backblaze releases a hard drive reliability report.
The 4TB model measures 21.5mm x 81.5mm x 110mm (HxWxL) and weighs 250g. You probably wouldn’t want to try and jam one into a shirt pocket, but they’re about as portable as a smartphone, just a little chunkier. The 1TB Passport is slightly thinner and weighs 170g, if you don't need as much space. It is, undoubtedly, the minivan of external hard drives. No external power supply is needed to use WD’s drive—just plug in the USB cable and start backing up your files. You can also install WD’s backup software to automate the process.
With 4TB of storage at your disposal, you can save:
- Up to 4,000 hours of digital video
- Up to 1,000 2-hour DVD movies
- Up to 1,280,000 digital photos
- Up to 66,640 hours of digital music
WD also goes the extra mile with password protection and hardware encryption. And if you’re looking to make a fashion statement, you can select a My Passport in a range of color options. There's a new model for 2019 too, which is slightly more stylish than the older one. Our tests, though, show the performance is comparable year on year.
If you need to go big when you leave home, Seagate's 8TB Expansion drive is the way to go. No, you don't get the best speeds when you're transferring files, although they're not too far behind the WD My Passport, but what you get is masses of space and a very reliable drive. While there's no real point getting a Seagate with less than the maximum capacity, as its speeds are eclipsed by other drives, the 8TB version strikes a nice balance between capacity and efficiency.
It hits around 150MB/s during both read and write tests, which is about mid-range for HDDs. It's USB 3.0 compatible too, so you've got a drive that'll plug into most PCs and laptops. In fact, if you're a regular laptop user, this is super handy for extending the pitiful storage you find in most machines. Just as a word of warning, though: this does require external power, and comes with its own power unit, so it's slightly less portable than other drives.
When you think about what external hard drives are actually used for, then suddenly durability becomes essential. While it might look like a doggy chew-toy, the LaCie Rugged portable HDD is as tough as they come, and even has a rubber cover around the edges to dampen the shock from any impacts. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, but you can drop this thing from a fair height and it'll stay perfectly intact. The speeds it operates at are respectable, if on the lower end of the scale, hitting about 110MB/s in read and write tests.
You can pick up the LaCie relatively cheap too, although you are paying a little more for durability. We'd recommend the 2TB, purely because this will last you so long it'll store your files for years. If you're someone who is a little careless with how they pack their bag, or you genuinely take your PC files on more extreme outings, then this is the external HDD for you. It comes in all kinds of variations, to suit all connection types, including USB 3.0, mini-USB, USB-C and multi-input versions.
