How Do I Download My Computer To An External Hard Drive

In an era when gigabytes of cloud storage cost a mere few dollars per month, and trim, slim external SSDs are getting cheaper, external hard drives, based on spinning platter disks, might appear less essential than they once were. But modern ones are faster, more stylish, and often more durable than their counterparts from a few years ago. They're ever more capacious for the money, too. For as little as $40, you can add a terabyte of extra storage to your laptop or desktop by just plugging in a USB cable.

Choosing an external drive isn't as simple as buying the most expensive one you can afford, however. The drive capacity is the most important factor to consider, and it can increase or decrease the cost dramatically depending on your needs. Other factors include the physical size of the drive (is it designed to be carted around, or to sit on your desk?), how rugged it is, the interface it uses to connect to your PC, and even what colors it comes in. This guide will help you make sense of these and many more questions that arise while you're shopping for an external hard drive.

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First off: We've outlined below our top picks among external hard drives we've tested. Read on for our labs-tested favorites, followed by the buying basics you should know when buying an external drive. Our article concludes with a detailed spec breakout of our top choices.

If you're addicted to downloading videos and snapping up every game you can find online, chances are you need inexpensive, voluminous storage to house it all. The Western Digital My Book, now available in capacities up to a whopping 22TB, can hold thousands of hours of video, or millions of MP3s or photos. With a good mix of capacity, pricing, and performance, it's a shoo-in as an Editors' Choice pick for desktop external hard drives.

The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch provides a touch of class in a market rife with dull, plastic-encased storage devices, standing out in a category that has long reached commodity status. This portable, spinning hard drive has a rare trait in mobile tech: texture. It's covered with a woven fabric that makes it feel like a familiar, friendly object in your hand.

Its performance is on point for a platter-based drive. And with Seagate's Toolkit utility, users can set up backup and sync plans and restore data, and enable security. It's easy to password-protect the Ultra Touch, and your data gets protected with the essentially uncrackable 256-bit AES hardware encryption.

This drive is well worth the money for Windows or Mac users. If you're looking for a secure, affordable hard drive that can compete with the best of them, the Backup Plus Ultra Touch is a solid pick with a warm, fuzzy side.

Its combination of solid performance, hardware encryption, and useful utilities makes the 5TB WD My Passport a strong contender for everyday backup of sensitive data or storing a massive collection of videos, photos, and documents. Slightly rounded edges and ripples give the My Passport drive both the look and the feel of a consumer gadget. The ripples also make it easy to grip the device.

The 5TB WD My Passport is a product of the manufacturer's added effort to make a simple plastic box look attractive. Add a choice of colors, a size that can fit in a shirt pocket, a range of capacities from 1TB to 5TB, and easy-to-find discounts from list price, and the WD My Passport is a clear standout and our Editors' Choice pick among high-capacity portable hard drives.

That said, as a platter-based hard drive, it's best equipped to store a game library; you're better off loading the games you're currently playing from an SSD. If you conservatively figure an average game size of 100GB, the 4TB version tested here can hold about 40 titles, serving as the stylish main repository of your collection for years to come, and for a much more modest outlay than you'd spend on an SSD of similar capacity.

There are rugged hard drives, and then there's the ADATA HD710M Pro External Hard Drive. Its IP (ingress protection) rating of IP68 for dust resistance and waterproofing (in the last case, submerged up to two meters for up to one hour) matches the best rating of any hard drive or SSD we have reviewed. The ADATA HD710M Pro also has grips and channels around the edges of the drive to keep the detachable USB cable tethered to the drive at all times, even when not plugged into the USB connector.

The SanDisk Professional G-Drive ArmorATD is a cost-effective, semi-rugged external hard drive available in capacities up to 5TB. As a spinning (5,400rpm) platter drive, its speed can't compare with an SSD, but it should work well for travelers or mobile workers who need lots of capacity for the spend. With a rubber bumper and internal shock mounts, the ArmorATD is rated to survive up to 1,000 pounds of pressure or a drop from 3.3 feet. Its ingress protection (IP) rating of IP54 promises some security against sand and rain. It comes formatted in Mac-friendly HFS+, one of two formats (along with APFS) compatible with the macOS Time Machine backup system. If you only have a Windows computer, you could (carefully) reformat it to NTFS, but you would probably be better off getting a hard drive already formatted in NTFS or exFAT.

Sporting a tasteful silver-and-black chassis, the LaCie Mobile Drive (2022) is a mildly redesigned version of the company's external hard drive that we reviewed in March 2019. Available in capacities up to 5TB, the new drive is easy to set up and use. Its LaCie Toolkit software enables backup, restore, and mirroring. Its touch of style brings a slightly higher cost than other external spinning hard drives, however.

The 2022 iteration of the LaCie Mobile Drive is a good choice for anyone who values capacity over speed, and who appreciates a rare touch of elegance in a platter-based hard drive. It costs a tad more per gigabyte than much of its platter-based ilk, but less than SSDs of equivalent capacity.

Just how much faster is it to access data stored in flash cells? Typical read and write speeds for consumer drives with spinning platters are in the 100MBps to 200MBps range, depending on platter densities and whether they spin at 5,400rpm (more common) or 7,200rpm (less common). External SSDs offer at least twice that speed and now, often much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps for the slowest ones. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature-length film, or a year's worth of family photos) to an external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning drive.

Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.

And portable hard drives can be a great value if what you need is raw capacity above all else. You can find a 2TB portable hard drive with ease (possibly even a 4TB one, depending on the day) for less than $100, and 5TB hard drives go for about $120. A 2TB SSD, though? Expect to pay at least two to three times as much as you would for that 2TB hard drive. And let's not even talk about the cost of 4TB and 8TB external SSDs.

A desktop drive with a single platter mechanism will typically use a 3.5-inch drive inside and comes in capacities up to around 20TB. Most are roughly 5 inches tall and 2 inches wide. In addition to storing large media collections, these drives can also serve as inexpensive repositories for backups of your computer's hard drive that you schedule, using either software that comes with the drive or a third-party backup utility.

At the other end of the physical-size spectrum are portable drives. Hard drive-based portables make use inside of the same kinds of platter-drive mechanisms used in laptops. These are called generically "2.5-inch drives," though they are actually a smidge wider than that. Any portable platter-based hard drive should fit easily in a purse or even a coat pocket. As a rule, portable drives get their power from the computer to which you connect them, through the interface cable, so there's no need for a wall outlet or a power cord/brick.

The best way to gauge relative value among similar portable drives is to calculate the cost per gigabyte, dividing the cost of the drive in dollars by the capacity in gigabytes to see the relative per-gig price. Example: A $60 1TB (1,000GB) hard drive would run you about 6 cents per gigabyte, while an $80 2TB (2,000GB) drive would work out to about 4 cents per gigabyte.

How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is second only to the type of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data. These connection types are ever in flux, but these days, most external hard drives use a flavor of USB, or in rare cases, Thunderbolt.

Right now, the fastest connection type in wide use on hard drives is Thunderbolt 3, which is handy assuming you have a newer laptop or desktop with a Thunderbolt 3 port. (Thunderbolt 4 is found on most new Macs and some new PCs, but drives that use it are not yet common.) Both Thunderbolt interfaces piggyback on a USB Type-C connector (not all USB Type-C ports support Thunderbolt, though) and offer blazing peak throughput of up to 40GBps. As a bonus, a desktop drive that supports Thunderbolt might also come with additional DisplayPort and USB connections that allow you to use the drive box as a hub for your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals. (See our explainer Thunderbolt vs. USB-C: What's the Difference?)

You'll only see the speed benefits of Thunderbolt, however, if you have a drive that's SSD-based, or a multi-drive, platter-based desktop DAS that is set up in a RAID array. For ordinary external hard drives, Thunderbolt is very much the exception, not the rule. It tends to show up mainly in products geared toward the Mac market. 2351a5e196