Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.Īnd portable hard drives can be a great value if what you need is raw capacity above all else. Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Our article concludes with a detailed spec breakout of our top choices. Read on for our labs-tested favorites, followed by the buying basics you should know when buying an external drive. This guide will help you make sense of these and many more questions that arise while you're shopping for an external hard drive.įirst off: We've outlined below our top picks among external hard drives we've tested. Other factors include the physical size of the drive (is it designed to be carted around, or to sit on your desk?), how rugged it is, the interface it uses to connect to your PC, and even what colors it comes in. The drive capacity is the most important factor to consider, and it can increase or decrease the cost dramatically depending on your needs. For about $50, you can add a terabyte of extra storage to your laptop or desktop by just plugging in a USB cable.Ĭhoosing an external drive isn't as simple as buying the most expensive one you can afford, however. They're ever more capacious for the money, too. But modern ones are faster, more stylish, and often more durable than their counterparts from a few years ago. In an era when many gigabytes of cloud storage storage cost a mere few dollars per month, and trim, slim external SSDs are getting cheaper, external hard drives, based on spinning platter disks, might appear less essential than they once were. How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication.

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