Best External Hard Drives

Choose an external HDD when you need bulk capacity for the money — backups, media libraries, archives — because external HDDs run several times cheaper per terabyte than external SSDs; a 5 TB portable HDD costs roughly what a 1 TB portable SSD does. Choose an external SSD when speed, shock resistance, or a truly pocket-sized form factor matters more than capacity. Sort the table on this page by price per TB and the gap is obvious.

Portable 2.5-inch drives run on USB bus power, fit in a pocket, and top out around 5 TB. Desktop 3.5-inch externals need a wall plug but reach 8–24 TB and give you a better price per terabyte. Pick portable if you need to carry it; pick desktop if it will sit on a desk permanently and you want maximum capacity for the money.

For backing up one computer, a common rule is a drive 2–3x your internal storage so the backup tool can keep some history. For a media or photo archive, size to your library plus room to grow. Because external HDDs are cheap per terabyte, sizing up is usually inexpensive insurance — check the $/TB column on this page and you will often find the next size up costs little more per gigabyte.

For a mechanical external HDD, no — USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) is far faster than the drive’s own mechanical speed, so the platter is the bottleneck, not the bus. USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) or Thunderbolt only matters for external SSDs, where a faster bus actually unlocks the drive’s read/write speed.

Yes. Any external drive works with the built-in backup tools — Time Machine on macOS, File History on Windows, rsync on Linux. Bundled backup software and hardware encryption are nice extras but should not drive your choice; buy on capacity, price per TB, and form factor first. macOS will offer to reformat a new drive to APFS the first time you point Time Machine at it.