If you’re running out of storage space on your laptop or you need to back up your data and store that backlog of videos you’re going to edit one day (I am, I swear), an external hard drive can solve your problem. The trouble is, there are hundreds of drive options ranging from dirt-cheap to crazy-expensive—which one is right for your needs? I’ve tested dozens, across operating systems and with different use cases in mind, to find the best external hard drives for storage, backups, gaming, video editing, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, and more.
Check out our other guides, including How to Back Up and Move Your Photos Between Services, How to Back Up Your Digital Life, and How to Back Up Your iPhone.
Updated September 2025: We’ve added the Seagate Ultra Compact SSD, LaCie’s new rugged SSD4 and the Corsair EX400U, and we crowned the new Samsung 990 the best internal SSD. We’ve also updated prices and links throughout.
Table of Contents
Best for Backups
For incremental backups, which we recommend, speed isn’t a huge factor. That’s why the first drive I recommend is this Western Digital Elements hard drive. I have been using a variation of the Elements desktop hard drive to make incremental backups of my data for more than a decade. These drives are big and require external power, but they’re some of the cheapest, most reliable drives I’ve used.
Transfer speeds are not off the charts—the Elements drive I tested scored 120 megabytes per second (MB/s) for sequential writes on Windows—but again, you should ideally be running backups overnight anyway, and even at these speeds the average PC backup will be done by morning. These drives use USB-C with support for USB 3, and I’ve had no problem using them with Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Storage options go all the way up to 20 terabytes. Just check the prices; sometimes you can get a 10- or even 12-TB drive for not much more than the 8-terabyte version. And I have not seen a huge difference between the Elements line, the WD My Book drives, or the WD My Passport drives. The My Passport drives command a premium price because they’re smaller, and the My Book drives have some encryption features that drive up the price, but I find the basic Elements drive is sufficient for most people.
Other Great Backup Drives
- Seagate Expansion 8-TB External Hard Drive for $159: Seagate is another reliable drive maker. It never hurts to have more backups, and if you do want multiple backups, use drives from different brands, since it will reduce the chance that both fail simultaneously.
Best for Portable Backups
If you travel a lot, you’ll want something that’s easier to carry than the Elements drives, which aren’t the best in a suitcase. For backups when traveling, I love Western Digital’s My Passport series, especially the new “Ultra” version, which uses a standard USB-C cord, eliminating the need to carry a separate cable. It’s not the thinnest drive on the market, but it’s less than an inch thick and solid enough that I never worried about tossing it in my bag. (Although it should be said that this is a spinning drive, so don’t literally toss it.) I also like that the corners are nicely rounded and there are no screws or anything else that will catch on fabric in your bag.
There are a variety of colors available and you can get from 1 TB to 6 TB. I tested the 5-TB model, but Western Digital claims the same speeds regardless of drive size. I tested it using CrystalDiskMark on Windows, AmorphousDiskMark on macOS, and KDiskMark on Linux and averaged the results to come up with 121 MB/s for read speed and 115 MB/s write speed. It’s not what you’d want to copy photos quickly for a client in the field, but fast enough to run a daily backup in your hotel room.
Other Portable Backup Drives
- Western Digital Elements 5-TB Portable HDD for $130: This drive is slightly thinner than our top pick, but feels flimsier in my experience. Speeds are tad slower as well, but if you’re on a budget this will save you a little cash. Corsair is marketing this as a good way to backup your iPhone ProRes footage, and while it certainly works for that, performance is limited by the iPhone’s USB-C interface. For maximum throughput, connect it to a PC with a USB4 or Thunderbolt 4 port.
The Thunderbolt 5 Drive: When Speed Is Everything
LaCie has updated its rugged SSD line with the Rugged Pro5. This one ditches the iconic orange padding for blue, but it is otherwise just like the ordinary LaCie padded drives on the outside. On the inside, this is an amazingly fast drive. The 5 in the name is for, you guessed it, Thunderbolt 5, which despite being announced seemingly forever ago, has been painfully slow to trickle onto the market. This made testing a bit tricky, but fortunately a friend let me borrow his brand-new MacBook Pro 14 for testing. And the results were impressive.
LaCie claims read/write speeds of up to 6,700 MB/s and 5,300 MB/s, which it says are enough for real-time editing of 8K and 6K RAW footage. In testing the highest speeds, file transfers were 5,787 MB/s read and 5,188 MB/s write—which, while not quite matching the claim, is still far and away the fastest drive on the page. But raw speeds are just numbers for spreadsheets; I was more interested in real-world performance. Since I happened to also be testing the Nikon Z6III (8/10, WIRED Recommends), which can shoot 6K ProRes RAW, I loaded a good bit of footage on the Pro5 and was indeed able to edit using DaVinci Resolve Studio.
The downside here is the price. At $600 for the 4-TB version (which is the minimum you’d want for working with ProRes RAW video files), this is a very pricey drive. It is however, well worth the money if it’s speed you’re after.
Best USB4 Drive
If you don’t yet have any devices with Thunderbolt 5 support, this Thunderbolt 4 drive would be my recommendation for anyone obsessed with speed. Corsair’s EX400U is an impressive little drive, consistently delivering speeds of around 3,800 MB/s for sequential read and and 3,550 MB/s write. Again, this is only going to be possible if you have a device that supports USB4/Thunderbolt 4 (including recent Macbooks, Dell XPS, and others—see our guide to the best laptops for more). Technically, just as I was wrapping up this update, Lacie’s new rugged SSD came out which beat this drive in my tests by about 10 MB/s, but this drive is smaller, lighter, and cheaper.
I also like that Corsair has included a Magsafe connector on the back of the case, which makes great option for backing up ProRes video footage from your iPhone.
Best Budget Portable SSD
These Crucial drives are my favorite general-purpose external storage drives. They’re reasonably priced (for a portable SSD) and speedy enough for most uses. The X6 is lightweight and tiny, making it a good choice for working at the coffee shop.
This isn’t a blinding-fast hard disk. In fact, under the hood, the X6 uses an older drive interface (Serial AT Attachment, or SATA), which was more common with spinning hard drives. So while it’s small and light, its speed is limited by that older interface technology. In my testing on Windows and macOS, that works out to about 550 MB/s read speed and 208 MB/s write speed. That’s good enough for backup and use as an external drive, but I don’t recommend it for Xbox or PlayStation use. It does work fine with the iPad Pro though.
