Best External Hard Drives (2026): SSD to Store Data, Video, and More

If you’re running out of storage space on your laptop or you need to back up your data or 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, so how do you know which one is right for you? I’ve tested dozens, across operating systems and with different uses 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 July 2026: I've removed some discontinued drives and added the SanDisk G-Drive ArmorATD because, let’s face it, with SSD prices climbing, spinning drives are much more compelling than they were a year ago. I’ve also updated prices and links throughout.

Best for Backups

The AI race and its attendant flurry of memory-hungry data centers are causing prices to skyrocket, with apparently no end in sight. Drives in this guide have tripled in price in the past six months. For example, 8-TB SSDs are selling for more than the price of a new MacBook Air, which itself has gone up $200 to help cover surging memory costs.

You know what data centers don’t seem to need, though? Spinning drives. While their prices have crept up some, these older drives remain affordable and are your best choice for backups anyway. For incremental backups, which we recommend, speed isn’t a huge factor.

I have been using a variation of the Elements desktop hard drive to make backups of my data for more than a decade. These drives are big and require external power, but they’re some of the cheapest and most reliable 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, 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, or 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. I have not seen a huge difference between the Elements line and the brand’s higher-end My Book drives, and the basic Elements drive is sufficient for most people.

**Seagate Expansion 8-TB External Hard Drive for $280:**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 an Elements drive, which isn’t the best for lugging around 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 worry 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 snag on fabric in your bag.

There are a variety of colors available, and you can choose 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 it’s fast enough to run a daily backup in your hotel room.

**Western Digital Elements 5-TB Portable HDD for $275:**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.

A More Rugged Spinning Drive

The SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD is a solid, semi-rugged external hard drive that doesn't (currently) cost as much as some of the others in this class. This is the first drive in Western Digital’s new SanDisk Professional line, and, somewhat uniquely among drives, it comes with the macOS-friendly HFS+ drive format out of the box, making it plug and play with Apple’s Time Machine backup system. You can still use it with Windows, you’ll just need to reformat it to exFAT (likewise, when testing on Linux, I formatted it to ext4).

The ArmorATD is compact for a spinning drive, measuring 3.4 by 5.1 inches and less than an inch thick. There’s a removable black rubberized sleeve to cushion the drive, with the actual drive enclosure being a silverish gray on the top and bottom. There's a cover on one end of the drive that protects a USB-C port with a USB 3.1 Gen 1 interface (which will work with the Thunderbolt 3 ports on recent Macs). The ArmorATD comes with two cables, one USB-C to USB-C and one USB-C to USB-A.

I call this one semi-rugged because it’s a spinning drive, which makes it more vulnerable to bumps and bruises, but SanDisk claims it’s capable of sustaining drops of up to 3.3 feet, and it gets an IP54 rating, which means it’ll stand up to splashes, but it can't be submerged in water.

The ArmorATD managed a read speed of 133 MB/s, just off the claimed 135 MB/s and a little faster than the WD Passport Ultra above. In all my testing, I’ve not seen a huge difference among similar spinning drives (that is, most 5,400 rpm drives score around 120-130 MB/s) and you’re unlikely to notice much difference in real world tasks. If you want something a little more rugged though, the G-Drive ArmorATD is solid option at a reasonable price. I tested the 2-GB model, but there are options from 1 GB up to 6 GB.

Best Thunderbolt 5 Drive

The LaCie Rugged Pro5 ditches the brand’s 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 having been 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. 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 adequate 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, still make it far and away the fastest drive in this guide. 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. This started off at $600 for the 4-TB version (which is the minimum you’d want for working with ProRes RAW video files). That was already pricey, but these days that’s climbed to insane heights ($1,600 as of this update), making it a less compelling value. Still, if you need the speed, this is the drive to get.

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