Best external drives 2024: Backup, storage, and portability

Not everyone wants or needs to spend extra for 20Gbps USB drive performance. The Crucial X9 strikes a compelling balance between 10Gbps performance and affordability that should please the majority of users. In our benchmark tests, it traded top scores with the SK Hynix Beetle (our runner-up choice below), but at a significantly lower cost — making it an indisputable win-win for consumers.

It’s also handsome, described by our reviewer as “a svelte object of desire.” More importantly, it feels well made, and is rated for IP55 dust and spray resistance, so you don’t have to baby this portable drive when you take it into harm’s way.

Alternative option: The Crucial X9 performs neck-and-neck with the SK Hynix Beetle X31 — a handsome little drive in its own right. Previously, this drive was the more pricey of the two, giving the Crucial X9 a slight edge. But it appears the Beetle X31 might be nearing the end of its production life because we are seeing it at a significant savings — as low as $85 for 1TB. This is great news for bargain hunters while supplies last.

The Crucial X6 Portable SSD is square to be hip (search Huey Lewis). Or placed in your hip pocket, at any rate. In a sea of portable SSDs whose shape and sometimes sharp edges makes them a literal pain when situated in your shirt or trousers, the thin, rounded-edge X6 is a sigh of relief. It’s not state-of-the-art fast, but it’s fast enough for most users and extremely affordable.

There’s something to be said for the thumb drive form factor. It’s eminently portable, being both small and eliminating the necessity of a connector cable. It’s also versatile as it can slot into the ubiquitous USB-A port.

The SK Hynix Tube T31 combines all that thumb-drive convenience with SSD performance, for the best of the both worlds.

Utilizing 10Gbps NVMe storage internally, the wee Tube T31 performs like a cable-attached SSD, and definitively outperformed other thumb drives in its class. And while it’s priced relatively high compared to a standard thumb drive, it’s priced competitively for its performance.

There’s no better option if fast and cable-free storage is what you’re after.

The competition is fierce in the top tier of 20Gbps external drives, with name-brand contenders trading wins up and down our benchmark charts. Nevertheless, a winner is a winner, and cumulatively, the Lexar SL600 edged out our previous champ, Crucial’s X10 Pro, by a hair.

On top of that, it comes in a uniquely shaped form factor, complete with an opening to accommodate a lanyard, if that’s how you roll. You can even take the highly portable drive’s design a step further by opting for the SL660 variant that comes with RGB lighting around its miniature handle. The SL600 is backed by a five-year warranty — two years longer than the norm for external drives.

When performance is this closely matched among products, the determining factor is price. In that respect also, the SL600 is neck-and-neck with the Crucial X10 Pro, and as of this writing, priced slightly to significantly cheaper than many of its competitors — particularly at the 2TB level.

Rated for 20Gbps and selling for $80 with 1TB of storage, the Teamgroup M200 is an attractive (in a military fashion) external drive for the budget-conscious performance enthusiast.

It might not be as cheap as the Crucial X6, but for the extra outlay you get outstanding everyday performance. In many tests, it’s the fastest 20Gbps drive we’ve ever tested. At just 4.13-inches long and 2.18-inches wide and weighing under 3 ounces, it’s also extremely portable and its slick combat-styling will appeal to gamers.

A USB 4 external SSD isn’t for everyone. Not only does your PC need to support the spec in order to take advantage of the 40Gbps transfers, but you pay a premium for the privilege.

If you’re ready to enter the club, the Adata SE920 will reward you with the fastest USB 4 performance we’ve experienced, and at a much more affordable price than our previous pick for USB 4, the OWC Express 1M2 — we’re talking $180 for a 1TB Adata SE920 versus $250 for the OWC drive. And if you want a lot of capacity, the Adata SE920 comes with up to 4TB, for $500.

We were also impressed by the SE920’s nifty built-in fan, which is activated when you slide open the enclosure as shown above. This kept our drive noticeably free of heat during our benchmark tests.

The SE920 is also quite portable at 4.13 inches long by 2.52-inches wide by 0.62-inches thick, and 7 ounces — another advantage it has over the bulkier OWC Express 1M2. A clear choice for our top USB 4 external SSD.

As the name suggests, unlike many of the external drives on this list, the SanDisk Desk Drive isn’t particularly portable. Not only is it too bulky for a pocket or laptop bag, it also requires an AC adapter.

That however, doesn’t detract from its utility, as the Desk Drive is really aimed at users with more sedentary workflows for auxiliary storage and backup. That’s also evident in the fact that it only ships in 4GB and 8GB capacities, priced competitively at $280 and $500, respectively.

Granted, that’s a lot more per-gigabyte than you’d pay for a backup hard drive. But with the Desk Drive you get brisk 10Gbps performance, and the assurance that comes from an SSD’s lack of moving parts, i.e. susceptibility to shocks. In other words, its speed, ruggedness, and reliability make it worth more an HDD.

We can forgive the cumbersome name, and the fact that this drive, misleadingly, doesn’t actually use a USB-C connector, because there are other more substantial ways that it pleases us.

For starters, the WD My Passport, Works with USB-C offers a ton of capacity — up to 6TB — and at a far more affordable price per terabyte than one can get from an SSD (around $30/TB versus twice that for the latter). This makes the WD My Passport a natural fit for backup needs, particularly since those can be timed during off hours, mitigating the need for an SSDs superior speeds.

As for the misleading moniker, the My Passport does indeed work with USB-C, but it’s by way of the drive’s standard SuperSpeed Micro-B port, using the included Micro-B to Type-A cable and a bundled Type-A to USB-C adapter. Mind you, WD’s My Passport Ultra series, which actually do feature a USB-C port, don’t perform any faster than this drive, and cost a bit more.

In fact, the My Passport performs on par with the best of 2.5-inch hard drives we’ve tested, while being the best deal. If it’s a portable, high-capacity hard drive that you’re after, this is the one to pick.

SSDs have certainly been a game changer in storage, but there are still times when a hard drive is the right tool for the job — and an unbeatable value. Such as when you need more capacity for your digital stuff than an SSD can provide.

Enter the 3.5-inch Seagate Expansion Desktop, which delivers up to 24TB of capacity — three times the current maximum for SSDs. It also delivers twice the sustained transfer rate of 2.5-inch external hard drives — our 16TB test unit read and wrote at close to 280MBps.

As mentioned, all this storage comes at a very competitive price point, hovering around $20 per terabyte, compared to the $70 per terabyte an SSD costs. Our only caveat is that HDDs are more fragile, and important data on them should be backed up regularly.

As we said in our review of the drive: “If you deal with large amounts of data, you can’t beat a high-capacity hard drive for gathering it into one place.” This is the drive we’d pick.

HDDs (hard disk drives) have been around for more than 50 years. They are essentially boxes containing spinning platters with read/write arms that skim across them to detect the orientation of, or re-align particles in, the magnetic material that coats the platters. 

SSDs (solid state drives), on the other hand, use flash memory and have no moving parts inside the drive. Data is instead stored in cells — aka, voltage traps — which are interconnected in a matrix. The matrix approach allows for data to be pushed or pulled to/from many different places at once and significantly increases both read and write speed — on the order of 100 times faster these days.

Generally speaking, SSDs are a better bet for your external drives due to their smaller size, faster speeds, and far superior ruggedness and durability. The main drawback to SSDs is that you pay quite a bit more per terabyte of storage. As technology and production techniques improve, the price of SSDs has and will continue to drop.

Ideally, you should back up your data as often as possible. This is especially true if you are working on an important project or have data that you absolutely cannot afford to lose. 

If you have your external hard drive connected to your computer at all times, it is a good idea to automate the backup process and have the drive back up your data as it changes, or every hour or so. Otherwise, connect and back up at least once a day. See our roundups of the best Windows backup software and the best online backup services to learn more.

This is because of the difference between the binary and decimal number systems, their nomenclatures, and a Microsoft miscue. Your 2TB drive indeed has two trillion bytes of storage, and if you look a the byte count that Windows displays in a drive’s properties dialog, this should be what you see. This in the International System of Units (SI/decimal) is two terabytes, or 2TB. This is the standard language vendors use as consumers are far more familiar with base 10.

However, Windows uses the newer International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) binary multiples 2^10 (Kibibyte/KiB), 2^20 (Mebibyte/MiB), 2^30 (Gibibyte/Gib). Binary multiples are larger numbers (one KiB is 1,024) so when Windows divides the total bytes by the IEC system, the you get something like 1.8TiB for a 2TB drive. Alas, Windows labels this as 1.8TB, misleading the user.

Other reasons you might not see as much available storage in the properties tab are formatting or partitioning. The file system uses some storage for file location and size info, etc. Also, some drives come with a small partition containing software so the main partition will be smaller than the drive’s total capacity.

The lifespan of an external hard drive can be anywhere from three minutes to 10 years depending on make and model, as well as the amount of use and operating environment. They’re mechanical devices subject to wear and susceptible to shock damage, so they should be kept cool and treated gently. Reliability has increased dramatically over the last decade.

Alas, judging the likely lifespan of an external hard drive is a crap shoot. Of course check the warranty, but the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) number is generally considered fantasy within the industry. Peruse user feedback which can provide insight into long term usage, and keep your ears peeled for strange noises, your fingers crossed, and don’t drop the thing! Our best guess is that you should get at least five years with careful handling.

SSDs don’t wear out or break mechanically, but their cells can only be written to so many times. SSDs generally have a TBW (terabytes that may be written) rating, but this is rarely provided by vendors for external SSDs. Hint: They may not use the same SSD inside throughout the product lifespan.

Most internal M.2 NVMe TLC SSDs are rated for around 600TBW per terabyte, and QLC types for around 200TBW, though the type of NAND in use is also rarely provided by vendors. That’s a lot of data, and a lot of SSDs are rated well below what they might achieve. You can guesstimate by using a utility to see how much data you write to an SSD a day and then doing the math.

External SSD warranties are generally between three and five years, but as with all such things, it’s a financial risk calculation for the company. As is the TBW. Our best guess based on experience is perhaps a decade. However, certain models have had issues long before that — generally due to a flaw or failure in the bridge chip or controller.

There are a few of ways that an external hard drive might fail. The motor might quit, the read/write heads might crash into the platter surface due to shock while operating, or the electronics might overheat and go belly up. You might get a warning in the form of strange noises such as a scraping or grinding sound. If the data is particularly important, turn it off immediately and call a recovery service. That scraping sound may be the coating on the platter being removed by a crashed head. This is unrecoverable. If you keep running it, back it up immediately and replace it.

SSDs generally go belly up due to the increasingly rare controller failure, which is a relatively easy fix/reset for someone who knows the SSD’s internals such as a recovery service. SSDs will also eventually wear out, though this only precludes further writing to the unit. You can still read what’s on the drive, so it’s not the disaster a HDD failure can be.