Best External Hard Drives 2017

Storage has never been cheaper. As little as $50, you may add a terabyte for your notebook or desktop via an external drive. That's enough to house more than 750,000 MP3s or photos, or more than 230 full-length picture files. Every pc on the market, from mega-huge desktop towers to budget-price Windows tablets, can connect to at least one hard disk, with no complex setup needed. And if you're lucky enough to have numerous I/O ports, you can hook up many more. But what to choose? There's a lot to think about--desktop- or laptop-class, conventional spinning or solid-state drive (SSD) are just a couple of factors. Here's everything you need to take into consideration while looking for a best external hard disk.

A cheap and budget option is to get a portable hard drive for mac either its wireless or not but a good and great mind will always go for most common and perfect hard disk drive.

Best External Hard Disk

Hard Drive Types
There are two types of external drives. Desktop-class drives, with 3.5-inch mechanics indoors, require a power adapter. They're made to stay in one location, typically on your desk in your home or at the office. If you are purchasing a desktop-class driveway for movie or a great deal of file transfers, then look for one with an integrated enthusiast, as the additional cooling will expand the drive's life expectancy. Notebook-class (aka pocket or mobile) hard drives are usually 2.5-inch mechanisms powered via the connector cable. It's possible to slip a 2.5-inch model to a jacket and even some pants pockets.

Desktop-class models now top out at 8 terabytes (TB) each mechanism, but some drive makers put two to four mechanisms into a chassis to get more storage (for instance, two 4TB drives for a total of 8TB of storage).

A word about numerous drives: You can increase speed, capacity, or data protection by purchasing an external RAID array, however, numerous drives include expense and (a few) complexity. Once you connect a single-volume external RAID array for your PC or Mac, then it will appear and act as another external drive. After that, it could be complex. You need to consider a drive with support for RAID levels 1, 5, or 10 if you're storing really important data that you can't afford to lose. There are additional RAID levels for capacity and speed, and both software and hardware RAID implementations. Read our excellent primer, RAID Levels Described, for a more in-depth explanation.

Topical SSDs are observed mostly at the notebook-class form factor. They're currently limited to smaller capacities, typically from the 64GB to 512GB range, though they top out at 2TB. Thunderbolt, USB 3.1/USB-C, and USB 3.0 outside SSDs are available today, but they're much costlier than spinning hard drives: For example, a simple 1TB USB 3.0 (spinning) hard disk goes for about $50 to $60, while a 1TB SSD utilizing USB 3.0 costs upwards of $300. Want to understand more about how tough drives and SSDs compare? Check out SSD vs. HDD: What is the Difference?

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External drives link to PCs and Macs via their external cables. USB 3.0 provides fast transfer rates and a minimum of fuss, since almost all desktop and laptop PCs come with USB ports. USB-C is a newer standard, supported utilizing the smaller USB-C connector, and is still fairly uncommon to find on drives. It has the same theoretical speed as the original Thunderbolt (10Gbps), however, is regulated by the same set of companies that developed the other formats of USB.

The external drives we have reviewed all have USB connectivity, a good thing because even detachable-hybrid tablets have a minumum of one USB 2.0 port, with its own theoretical 480Mbps throughput. Fairly common, but ostensibly speedier, is the FireWire port, in the two 400Mbps and 800Mbps formats. FireWire 400 and 800 are signal-compatible (they can use the same wires), however they have distinct FW400 or FW800 connectors on the ends of these cables. FireWire can be daisy-chained; you can join multiple drives or devices up to a single FireWire port when you join them together first.

The next fastest interface you'll see in an external hard drive is eSATA, which is theoretically capable of 3Gbps (3,000Mbps), an order of magnitude faster than USB 2.0. Drives which are eSATA harmonious are on the way out today that Thunderbolt and USB have substituted eSATA in many programs. Concerning interface, USB 3.0 is even quicker than eSATA, with a 5Gbps theoretical throughput. USB 3.0 has the benefit of being backward-compatible using USB 2.0 (it can connect to USB 2.0 interfaces, but will move but at the lower USB 2.0 speeds). You can come across drives with numerous ports (by way of example, a triple interface drive with USB 2.0/3.0, FireWire 800, and eSATA), even though you'll still only have the ability to join one drive to one computer, and each additional interface increases the drive's sophistication and cost. USB-C uses smaller plugs and jacks compared with traditional USB, but it might use appropriate hardware. A handful of USB memory sticks and hard drives are currently available with both USB 3.0 and USB-C support through two separate connectors. Optional adapters will allow you to use old USB drives with PCs with newer USB-C ports.

All About Thunderbolt
Among the outlying interconnect technology is Thunderbolt (formerly known as Light Peak), that was developed by Intel and first championed by Apple. Thunderbolt was initially designed as a quick optical link (with fiber optics), however, the practicality of adding a new connector into existing systems ordered that the shipping version works with copper cables and current connectors. Visually (although not electrically) identical to the Mini DisplayPort connector, the Thunderbolt interface can drive both screens and external hard drives. Much like FireWire, Thunderbolt devices may be daisy-chained with each other to work with one connector on a laptop or desktop, and the interface may be used to boot a Mac (USB boot drives may not work on some Macs). On top of that, the Thunderbolt 2 interface has a quicker theoretical throughput: up to 20GBps.

Thunderbolt is getting to be a frequent standard in professional-grade systems from manufacturers as varied as Apple, Dell, and HP. We see Thunderbolt as a niche player, mainly in higher-end desktop and mobile workstations, in which you need to transfer a lot of data quickly. It uses the same connector and cables as USB-C and doubles the throughput ceiling into 40Gbps, but both the external drive and your computer has to be Thunderbolt 3--compatible to get the maximum out of this new interface.

How Significant Is Drive Speed?
If you are transferring a lot of files over a quick interface such as eSATA (fast), USB 3.0/ /USB-C (faster), or Thunderbolt (fastest), then by all means opt for the 7,200rpm drive. But if you're limited to USB 2.0 or FireWire 400/800, then I'd trade speed for capacity and receive the greatest 5,400rpm drive that your budget permits. USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 are older ports that operate good with a 5,400rpm drive. If all-out speed is your target, multiple drives (7,200rpm, 10,000rpm, or SSD) over Thunderbolt 3 is the quickest (and priciest), using a single SSD connected via Thunderbolt 1/2 or USB 3.0/3.1 as second quickest, and so on.

Finally, there are some additional differentiators to think about. Color and design: You can buy different colored drives for each family member, for instance. Included software is a variable should youn't already have a backup program. Warranty is also a big element in our evaluations: Drives can and will fail on you. This cheap drive you located on a bargain site might only come with a one-year warranty. Look for a three- or - five-year warranty if you are tough on your drives.

To get you started toward the perfect add-on backup/storage solution, below are 10 of the finest drives we have tested. For more options, take a look at our lists of the best network-attached storage (NAS) drives and cloud storage solutions.

Editors' Choice

The Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive (5TB) is incredibly spacious, fairly fast, and because it has a class-leading five terabytes of storage, it costs just pennies per gigabyte.
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Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive (4TB)
Editors' Choice

The Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive provides you 4 terabytes of storage that is fast you can take with youpersonally, as well as a private cloud, all for a very reasonable price.
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Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC (1TB)

The 1-terabyte Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC has an integrated cable you can not lose, a rugged chassis that will survive a demanding daily life, and an NFC reader and card add some safety to this mobile hard drive.
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Boasting throughput rates of greater than 500MBps along with a 6TB formatted capacity, the CalDigit T4 RAID is a quick, spacious drive that is well equipped for fast tackling multitrack audio and 4K video jobs.
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Using its protective rubber bumpers and quick 4 terabytes of storage, the LaCie Rugged RAID has exactly what is needed to handle the rigors of your journeys or even just your everyday life.
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The 6TB Promise Pegasus2 R2+ is a flexible external drive for Thunderbolt 2-equipped Macs and PCs. It uses a two-drive RAID array for speed and capacity, but it can be redeemed with detachable hard-drive pods or its comprised media card reader.
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Samsung Portable SSD T3 (2TB)

The pricey Samsung Portable SSD T3 is one of the fastest mobile drives we've tested. It's an ideal option if you need lots of speedy storage in a box about the size of a deck of cards.
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The 2TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra adds color options, 256-bit hardware protection, and also a longer-than-average guarantee to a strong mobile hard disk.
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Fantom Drives DataShield Portable SSD DSS1000 (1TB)

The 1TB Fantom Drives DataShield SSD has secure 256-bit AES encryption and a numerical keypad to safeguard the drive using a passcode.
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The 2-terabyte Transcend Storejet 300 for Mac has both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports, which can be convenient if all of your USB ports are busy. However, you'll pay for this flexibility.