Do you need a lot of local storage? Today's hard drives are bigger and cheaper than ever. If you're looking for extra physical storage to hold your precious data, you don't have to look too far to find a good cheap external hard drive that will suit your needs without draining your bank account.
Below we've rounded up a large selection of the best cheap external hard drive deals currently available from various online retailers. Whether you need a portable SSD for on the go or a desktop hard drive to back up terabytes of data, these external hard drive offerings meet almost any storage need:
Today's Best External Hard Drive Deals
- Maxone 500 GB Ultra Slim External Hard Drive - - $ 37was $ 47
- Seagate Mobile Drive 1TB external hard drive for Chromebooks - - $ 50was $ 60
- Western Digital Elements 2TB portable hard drive - - $ 60, was $ 130
- Silicon Power Rugged Armor 2TB portable hard drive - - $ 65, was $ 135
- Western Digital Elements Portable 5TB External Hard Drive - - $ 99, was $ 130
- Seagate Expansion Desktop 16 TB External Hard Drive - - $ 295was $ 390
How to choose an external hard drive
The first two steps in choosing an external hard drive are to determine your budget and what size you will need. As cheap as storage per gigabyte is in 2020, the classic compromise between hard drive size and portability remains. Is disk space or physical size your primary consideration? If your external hard drive is intended for home and office use on a single workstation and is more or less in one place, storage space is more valuable than mobility. On the other hand, if you frequently move data from one PC to another, a portable hard drive may be a better choice even if you are sacrificing storage space for less space.
What exactly you use your hard drive for is also taken into account when making your purchase decision. If your external hard drive or SSD is only intended for file storage, this is pretty easy. However, if you regularly read and write to your external storage (such as doing video editing right from the drive itself rather than your drive) you want to make sure you're getting something that has good read and write speeds and up-to-date connectivity standards used as USB 3.0. Read on for more information about external hard drive designs and features to consider when making your purchasing decision.
HDD vs. SSD
Storage drives can usually be divided into two main categories: conventional hard drives or hard drives and solid-state drives or SSDs. Most hard drives were mechanical hard drives until recently. These have moving plates (called platters) inside on which the data itself is written and read. These traditional hard drives have largely fallen out of favor for use as system drives, but because of their larger capacity and much cheaper cost per gigabyte, they are still a very popular choice for use with external storage.
In the past few years we've seen the solid-state drive revolution. These drives are essentially a type of flash memory that writes data to chips rather than magnetic disks. This means there are no moving parts, which in turn means faster read / write speeds as well as (in theory) greater long-term reliability. However, these drives are typically smaller and significantly more expensive per gigabyte than hard drives. The downside is that you can usually find these by looking for portable external hard drives that are small enough to carry in your pocket.
There are also hybrid hard drives, sometimes called SSHDs. These hybrid drives are essentially hard drives with built-in flash memory (usually a relatively small amount) that store and read your most frequently used files. Much of the responsiveness of SSDs is combined with the larger storage capacity of hard drives. These might be worth the price if you need the extended storage of a hard drive but expect to actively read and write to the external drive a lot.
Are all external hard drives SSD?
Almost any hard drive can be used as an external drive with a suitable housing. These are available as SSDs as well as HDDs. Although SSDs are quickly replacing HDDs for use as internal system drives (the hard drive in your PC that has your operating system and other software installed on it), HDDs for external use are still very popular as they are much, much per gigabyte are cheaper and thus you work with a lot more storage for your dollar.
Are External Hard Drives Reliable?
An external hard drive is simply any hard drive or SSD - just like laptops and desktop PCs - housed in an external housing. This enclosure provides a few options for connecting the hard drive to your computer or other device, usually a USB port, and may also have an AC adapter (depending on its size). This means that an external hard drive is about as reliable as any internal hard drive, as long as it is from a reputable manufacturer. Stick with proven manufacturers like Western Digital, Seagate, SanDisk, Samsung, and Kingston and your data should be in safe waters.
Are External Hard Drives Fast?
One very important thing to consider is read and write speed (the speed at which data is downloaded from and uploaded to the hard drive). However, this is less of a potential hazard than it has been in the past. Even traditional rotating hard drives (HDDs) offer pretty solid read / write speeds these days, with 7,200 RPM being the standard. Make sure to check this out and avoid anyone using the older 5,400 RPM standard, although these are less common these days. Solid-state drives offer the best read / write speeds, of course, but, as explained above, offer the lowest value per gigabyte.
Also, don't overlook the connection speed. The fastest read / write speeds are bottlenecks when transferring data over a connection that uses an older standard like USB 2.0. Make sure that your external hard drive uses at least USB 3.0 (which is about ten times faster than USB 2.0 by comparison).
Do external hard drives need power?
Hard drives are electronic devices that require power from an external source. However, this does not mean that all external hard drives must be connected to a wall. Most can usually get enough power from the same USB connection they use to transfer data. However, larger hard drives may require an external power supply that comes with the hard drive. This isn't a huge problem for most, but it's something to consider when electrical outlets are prime properties that you'll be setting up your drive in.
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