

“Since portable drives are meant to be taken with you, they are designed to be more durable in terms of the everyday wear and tear of taking them along with you. If you’re deciding between an external desktop hard drive and a portable hard drive, ask yourself how often you’ll be moving it around and how careful you are. Get an SSD if you want a drive that has extra protection against getting knocked around, and if you need speed.

Many desktop hard drives are available in capacities of 14 TB or more, but most people don’t need that much storage. Capacity: We focus on 4 TB and 5 TB hard drives because of the balance they strike between value and total cost.Price: Although we consider drives of all prices, we limit our testing to models priced below $150, and we compare their value on a dollar-per-terabyte basis.Performance: We evaluate each drive with tests that replicate different real-world uses.

We dismiss drives built exclusively for Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 because they cost too much and don’t perform noticeably better for most people. Input: We consider drives with a variety of USB port types-USB Type-B, Micro-B, or Type-C-but regardless of the port, we look at only those drives that support the most current USB standard, USB 3.2 Gen 2.
