The Best External Hard Drives: Our Top Storage Picks for 2025

Budget Before anything else, you'll want to figure out how much you're willing to spend on a new hard drive. Compact solid-state drives that use flash memory are pricier than slower and bigger mechanical drives, but they have gone down in price over the last couple of years. Today, you can get a 1TB external SSD for as little as $65 or so. Very high-capacity SSDs tend to be quite pricey, so if you're looking for a lot of storage for not too much money, you'll likely have to opt for a mechanical drive. Capacity External drives start at 500GB and go all the way up to 22TB or so. For a lot of people, especially if you're looking at a faster SSD, the storage sweet spot is 1TB or 2TB. If you need more than that, you'll likely be deciding between spending a lot on a 4TB SSD or opting for a more affordable but slower 4TB or 5TB mechanical drive. Data transfer speed Solid state drives are delivering faster and faster data transfer speeds. SSDs that offer the fastest speeds are also quite ... Read full article.