Most computers these days come with an internal SSD, which is very fast and is the reason your PC starts up much more quickly than the one you had ten years ago.
The only problem with it is that, unless you’ve splurged on an exceptionally expensive machine like one of the top-end MacBook Pro laptops, the SSD is quite small, and if you’re in the habit of taking a lot of photos or video, or perhaps downloading a lot of games, then you’ll soon run out of space. Enter the external hard drive.
The death of the old-fashioned spinning hard drive as a storage option inside PCs is driven by a few factors. Partly it came down to the increased data transfer speed of the SSD, but also its size. An M.2 drive is thin, flat, and can be tiny, while even the smallest HDD requires space to operate. It also has moving parts, which the SSD doesn’t, and the rise of smartphones and tablets means that a lot more solid-state storage is being made, so SSDs benefit from economies of scale.
And while external SSDs certainly exist, and are the storage of choice for video or 3D professionals who attach them to fast Thunderbolt ports or build large networked arrays of them to minimise the time spent copying large amounts of data to and from their PCs, for the rest of us an external hard drive is still the most cost-effective way to add large amounts of extra storage, though the external SSD is gaining on it, and many companies have sold off their hard drive businesses in favour of the higher-speed alternatives.
While USB flash drives can hold hundreds of gigabytes of data, external hard drives and SSDs - connected to PCs and Macs via their USB ports, can stretch into the terabytes, and if you have a huge photo collection, or just want a convenient way to make backups using Windows’ built-in backup tools or Apple’s Time Machine, an external hard drive is the way to go.
Here are some of the brands to look for.
Best external hard drive brands at a glance:
- Best for big storage: Western Digital
- Best for useful features: Seagate
- Best for pro use: SanDisk
- Best for simplicity: Toshiba
- Best for eye-catching design: LaCie
- Best for high speeds: Crucial
- Best for bargain capacity: UnionSine
- Best for full-featured flash: Lexar
Western Digital
Best for: big storage
Search online for an external hard drive and the chances are you’ll come across a Western Digital, or WD, model pretty quickly. The American company, founded in 1970 in California’s Newport Beach by a former Motorola employee, has been producing USB hard drives since forever.
Notable ranges include the Elements Portable and My Passport Ultra portable drives, which are powered by the USB bus and don’t require a power supply of their own, plus the My Book and Elements desktop drives, which are available in capacities of up to 22TB (or 44TB in the case of the My Book Duo).
Buy now, Western Digital
Seagate
Best for: useful features
External drives from Seagate come in capacities of up to 24TB, and its desktop drives come in many flavours, such as the One-Touch Hub that features a useful forward-facing USB hub that can charge your devices while your computer is turned off thanks to the drive’s separate power supply.
Seagate, an American company founded in 1979 as Shugart Technology but changing its name to Seagate the same year to avoid a lawsuit, is headquartered in Fremont, California, and has bought up the hard drive businesses of Samsung and Maxtor to become a giant in the sector.
Buy now, Seagate
SanDisk
Best for: pro use
Now a part of Western Digital, SanDisk is well known for its flash memory and SSD products, having created the very first SSD in a 2.5-inch form factor - a 20MB model for IBM in 1991, which cost around $1,000. Thankfully, prices have come down a bit since then, and SanDisk’s SD and CFexpress cards are used by many pro photographers and filmmakers.
Some of Western Digital’s external hard drives are also sold under the SanDisk brand, with the G-Drive Project, an enterprise-class drive available in capacities up to 24TB and with a Thunderbolt interface, being a case in point.
Buy now, Western Digital
Toshiba
Best for: simplicity
Tokyo Shibaura Electric Co became Toshiba in 1979, having existed under its previous name since 1939, and the company invented the kind of solid-state storage we call flash memory back in 1980, when one of its engineers showed that memory cells could be quickly erased by applying a specific voltage. The company is still active in the external hard drive market today, and its drives, sold under the Canvio name, come in multiple forms with capacities up to 4TB.
Buy now, Toshiba
LaCie
Best for: eye-catching design
LaCie’s distinctive orange rugged hard drive cases are easily spotted, but there's more to the company’s external drive offering than that. LaCie comes from a merger of two companies, one American and one French, and its name translates as simply ‘the company’.
Its early products were associated with the Apple Macintosh, and were used by creative professionals, which led to a sophisticated design and ergonomic shape that still echoes today in products such as the d2, with its peculiar glowing blue ‘eye’ (and capacity of up to 24TB), and the small, sleek Mobile Drive (up to 5TB) that sits well with ultrabook computers.
Buy now, LaCie
Crucial
Best for: high speeds
Crucial is a brand name used by Micron Technology, an American producer of memory and storage products. It makes external SSDs rather than hard drives, with capacities of up to 4TB, and drives such as its X10 Pro offer a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 interface, for a 20Gb/s connection and sequential read speeds of 2,000 MB/s.
You’ll need a PC or Mac with a compatible USB-C port to use one at its top speed (the cheaper X9 Pro has a slower connection that will save you some cash if you don’t have the right connector) but if you can meet its needs Crucial supplies one of the fastest external drives out there.
Buy now, Crucial
UnionSine
Best for: bargain capacity
A Chinese company, and a relative newcomer to the scene having been registered in 2013, UnioSine partners with companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi, and has a range of data storage products including external hard drives of up to 18TB capacity. The externally powered UnionSine 3.5 is its largest offering, which can often be found for a bargain price online, but if it’s portable storage you’re looking for, the UnionSine HD-006 can pack in up to 1TB of data and is powered over the USB bus.
Buy now, UnionSine
Lexar
Best for: full-featured flash
A well-known maker of flash drives and memory cards, Lexar is now a subsidiary of Chinese company Longsys, though since being spun out from American firm Cirrus Logic in 1996 it has also been owned by Micron.
These days it concentrates on flash memory products, such as USB drives (including the JumpDrive brand that was used as a generic term for flash drives when the tech was new) memory cards and external SSDs, including the Armor 700 portable SSD that puts up to 4TB of high-performance storage into a dust and water- resistant shell and adds 256bit AES encryption to keep your valuable data safe from all kinds of threats.
Buy now, Lexar
Verdict
The external hard drive market may be shrinking in favour of SSDs, but there are still plenty of options if you’re looking for plentiful portable storage at a price that doesn’t make your wallet seal itself shut. Western Digital’s external hard drives are certainly big, and you can get hold of them easily from online stores or directly from the manufacturer.
Other brands such as Seagate and the external SSD specialists offer more speed, features or security, but if it’s simple storage you’re after WD has plenty of options.
