With any luck, our gaming laptops and gaming PCs are cruising along at high speeds thanks to zippy solid-state drives. Even the latest generation of consoles are built around solid-state storage. But, where those drives excel in speeds, they tend to lack in capacity. Unfortunately, adding more storage to a lot of these devices can be a serious undertaking. External storage drives provide an effective alternative that can let you make up for a lack of space on your devices.
You'll find external storage comes in all shapes and sizes. You can get massive capacity with external hard drives, or you can even go for high speeds with external SSDs. Using more recent USB and Thunderbolt connections, you can even see external drives offering well over 1GB/s transfer speeds. And, one perk external drives have over internal ones is the ability for you to use them to transfer data easily between different devices.
Gamers can especially benefit from external drives as consoles like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 have particularly small base storage when considering how big modern games are. An external drive can let you keep a larger game library available. In fact, Sony's latest update allows you to move PS5 games to external storage, so you can easily transfer them back to the fast internal storage when you want to play without needing to download them all over again.
If you're ready to add an external hard drive to your setup, we've picked out some great options. You can find extra-durable models, large storage, networking options, and some extra-secure drives.
TL;DR – These are the Best External Hard Drives:
1. Western Digital My Passport 4TB
Best External Hard Drive
Western Digital covers most of your bases with the WD My Passport 4TB drive. This external hard drive is able to provide a ton of storage space for an affordable $119 price, letting you get effectively 1TB per $30. You won’t get the speeds of an SSD, but for general use, you might not need the speeds of an SSD all the time.
On the plus side, this drive does use USB 3.0 connectivity to give it decent transfer speeds. You won’t be waiting all day just to transfer a few gigabytes of content between your computer and your drive. Potability with this drive is also a bonus, as it’s less than an inch thick, weighs less than half a pound, and only requires one cable. Many high-capacity drives might connect over USB but then require an auxiliary power source, but this drive connects and is powered using the same USB connection.
2. Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox 1TB SSD
Best Xbox Series X/S External Hard Drive
You can plug any old USB-based external hard drive into your new Xbox Series X/S, but they'll only let you store your old games from previous generations. New games designed for this latest generation of hardware require faster storage, and the only option for that is the Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X/S.
This Seagate drive doesn't use USB or suffer from its limited bandwidth. Instead, it gets a direct PCI Express connection with the Xbox, which gives it bandwidth that can match the Xbox Series X/S's own internal storage. It comes at a high price, but it'll effectively double your Xbox Series X storage or almost triple your Xbox Series S storage, and it's the most compact drive on this list by far.
3. WD_Black P50 Game Drive
Best PS5 External Hard Drive
Thanks to a fresh update you can move your PS5 games, along with your backward-compatible PS4 games, over to an external hard drive. While you won't be able to play PS5 games stored on your external HDD, you can at least save yourself the trouble of having to redownload 100GB of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare all over again. Of all the options on the market the WD_Black P50 Game Drive is the one you'll want to get, and believe us we know a lot of other ways of expanding your PS5 storage.
This drive offers blistering 2,000MB/s read speeds as it's actually an external SSD, rather than a traditional hard drive. And, with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 connection, you'll be able to take full advantage of the drive's speeds. This way you can quickly transfer your PS5 library between the internal and external storage, or for new console owners setting up their new PS5, this drive will help speed transferring your data from the PS4 to PS5. And for those with a sizable PS4 library, an fast external drive is the best way to store your last-gen games. Factor in the performance upgrade some PS4 games can get from the PS5, and you could have an all-around enhanced experience playing last-gen titles with this drive.
4. WD_Black P10 Game Drive
Best External Hard Drive for Gaming
While you might not be able to play the latest generation of games from an external hard drive, there’s still a place for the technology. Hard drives offer a ton of storage at an affordable price, giving you lots of room for a big game library without the high price of an SSD. The WD_Black P10 Game Drive is an excellent option in this regard. You can grab a 5TB model for a reasonable price and store a vast collection of games on it.
The WD_Black P10 Game Drive connects over a modest USB 3.0 connection, but that won’t be an issue as the drive’s 130MB/s read speeds won’t be bottlenecked by that. You may be able to play some games directly off the hard drive (like backward-compatible titles), but even when you can’t, you’re not completely out of luck. With 5TB of storage, you can slot in a bunch of games and then rather quickly transfer them back over to your game console’s internal storage to play without having to worry about your internet bandwidth or data caps like you might if you were always re-downloading them.
5. LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 2TB
Best Rugged External Hard Drive
If you’re hauling your external drive around "in the wild," hackers and thieves aren’t all you need to worry about. There’s also the age-old problem of just straight up having butterfingers and watching your precious device turn into a broken brick. Thankfully, there are tough external drives like the LaCie Rugged. Built to withstand falls of over five feet, the bright orange removable cover is also IP54-level resistant to dust and water.
Plus, the LaCie Rugged offers fast transfer speeds via Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 connections so it'll work with any computer on the market. The Thunderbolt cable tucks away neatly into the perimeter of the casing too, so you don't have to worry about losing it.
6. Western Digital 16TB My Book Duo
Best High-Capacity External Hard Drive
Of course, not all external drives need to be portable, and if you're looking to backup your desktop computer, there are some cavernous options. One of the biggest—and best—hard drives is Western Digital’s My Book Duo. With two 8TB HDDs, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a higher-capacity storage option (other than, you know, the bonkers 24TB version).
You can even set the two drives up in a RAID 1 array so you’ve got a huge backup of your huge backup. Plus, you can set up WD’s automatic backup software on your computer and forget about worrying over whether your data is backed up or not.
7. G-Technology G-Drive Mobile 2TB
Best External Hard Drive for MacBooks
The G-Technology G-Drive Mobile 2TB is the best external hard drive for MacBooks that will set you free from the dongle life. Its main feature is a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port that lets it achieve 140MB/s transfer speeds. That port also means no more fussing around with adapters. And, with more and more PC's using USB-C, transferring between devices can be even easier.
The G-Technology G-Drive is also impressively slim and light, with one of the most compact builds on this list. And, it comes in sliver, space gray, and gold colors to match your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. It's even made with aluminum for go for the same premium feel as your laptop.
8. iStorage diskAshur 2TB
Best Encrypted External Hard Drive
Some data is so precious you can’t trust just any old external drive to handle the job. Behold, the iStorage diskAshur, featuring 256-bit AES encryption and physical numpad on the device’s face to lock your data behind a 7-to-15-digit pin. Plus, it’s even possible to set up the diskAshur so it destroys all its data if someone tries to crack their way in—how 007. But in all seriousness, government organizations use these iStorage drives for a reason, and if you’re serious about security, so should you.
They're not only durable, but also convenient thanks to a compact size and neatly built-in USB cable. And, beyond the encryption and automatic locking features, the keys are designed to resist showing signs of keypad usage that might otherwise help someone guess the numbers in your pin.
9. WD My Cloud Home
Best Cloud-Connected External Hard Drive
The WD My Cloud Home is a capable and yet delightfully simple hard drive that connect to any device on your network. Once hooked up to your home Wi-Fi setup, any device on your network can upload files to this drive whether it be a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. And while you're outside you can also access this storage like a Cloud drive.
You can find the WD My Cloud Home in a wide range of capacities, letting you pick out the size that best fits your needs. If you need to ensure the safety of your data, you can even get a model with two drives so it can keep a duplicate copy of each file. That said it isn't a true NAS, if you're looking for a robust, expandable Network-Attached Storage solution.
10. Sabrent Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station
Best External Hard Drive Dock
If you want to have external storage but already have your own drives, the Sabrent Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station will help you out. This SATA-based dock will let you plug in a pair of drives, and they don’t need to be identical. You can plug in 3.5-inch hard drives, 2.5-inch SSDs, or one of each. The bay can support up to 10TB drives, so you can really build out your external storage.
Sabrent’s docking station uses USB 3.0 to support up to 5Gbps transfer speeds, letting you quickly access files you have stored on your external drives. If you want to secure your data, the docking station also provides a convenient way of backing up your drives. Simply connecting one drive to slot A and a second drive to slot B will set you up to use the docking station’s Offline Cloning feature to copy the first drive’s content onto the second drive.
What to Look for in an External Hard Drive
Buying an external hard drive might seem like a simple matter of finding the capacity you want at the lowest price possible, but that's a sure-fire way of getting a lemon and losing your data forever.
If you're already in the market for a portable HDD over an external solid-state drive, you're probably more interested in capacity than speed. Definitely don't expect to get wickedly fast data transfer speeds out of these drives.
Although they might spin at the same 5,400 to 7,200 RPM (revolutions per minute) as the desktop drives in your PC, the USB 3.0 bus limits transfer speeds to about 100 or 200MBps. Comparatively, the fastest Thunderbolt II-enabled SSD can hit speeds up to 2,800MBps.
Kevin Lee is IGN's Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam
