You can easily pick up a 1TB drive for under £50 and a 2TB drive for around £20 more. The latest USB standards deliver transfer speeds that are plenty fast enough for most, so the biggest bottleneck will be the performance of the HDD contained within the housing. These feature 2.5in, 5,400rpm drives of the sort we used to see in laptops, housed in a toughened casing and using a single USB connection for both power and data transfer. Today, external drives come in three basic forms, the biggest and most popular category of which is the portable HDD. How to choose the best external hard drive for you What type of drive should I buy? The best external SSD for PC gaming | From £70 | WD Black P50.The best high-capacity desktop drive | From £92 | Seagate One Touch Hub.The best durable external hard drive | From £78 | G-Technology Armor ATD.The best portable external hard drive | From £65 | LaCie Mobile Drive.The best value USB hard drive | From £47 | Seagate One Touch.READ NEXT: The best external hard drives for PS4 | The best external hard drives for Xbox One Whatever your needs, whatever your budget, we’ve got the right external storage for you. We’ve picked out some of the best external drives – both SSD and HDD – to cover all requirements, including desktop models, slimline portables and matchbox-sized SSDs. Even a basic USB 3 or 3.2 Gen 1 drive will be fast enough for most purposes, while you can pair the latest USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 and 4 SSDs with a laptop that supports them and get enough speed for 4K video editing or gaming. They’re cheap, capacious and increasingly speedy – and all you need to do is plug them in. This isn’t just hitting PC gamers, but also the console crowd.Įxternal HDDs and SSDs are the answer. Gamers get it even harder – we’re seeing some big titles demanding more than 100GB, with some getting closer to 200GB.

High-res audio files, 4K videos and 20-megapixel photos can quickly fill the average laptop’s 256GB SSD, and if you’re working on a project or holding on to your music files and photos, you’ll soon run out of space. Laptops and PCs keep getting smaller and lighter, but storage space has never seemed so tight – which is why you need the best external hard drive you can afford.

Best external storage for imac