Our Experts
Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may get a commission.
Reviews ethics statement
David Carnoy Executive Editor / Reviews
Executive Editor David Carnoy has been a leading member of CNET’s Reviews team since 2000. He covers the gamut of gadgets and is a notable reviewer of mobile accessories and portable audio products, including headphones and speakers. He’s also an e-reader and e-publishing expert as well as the author of the novels Knife Music, The Big Exit and Lucidity. All the titles are available as Kindle, iBooks, Kobo e-books and audiobooks.
Expertise Headphones, Bluetooth speakers, mobile accessories, Apple, Sony, Bose, e-readers, Amazon, glasses, ski gear, iPhone cases, gaming accessories, sports tech, portable audio, interviews, audiophile gear, PC speakers Credentials
- Maggie Award for Best Regularly Featured Web Column/Consumer
What’s the best external drive?
While cloud storage seems more convenient, many people still prefer external drives for storing data in a safe and secure manner. Running low on space for those precious family photos or important work files? Investing in an external hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD) could be exactly what you need. We’ve tested the top storage options on the market to help you find reliable devices that offer great value for your money.
Storage prices have come down over the years, but high-capacity SSDs will still need a bigger investment. That’s why you can also opt for traditional hard disk drives. They aren’t as fast as SSDs, but they give you more storage space for your dollar. When choosing your drive, remember to check what cables you’ll need, as this can affect both compatibility and convenience.
All of CNET’s top picks for external hard drives and SSDs are compatible across platforms, including Windows PCs, Macs and gaming consoles like PlayStation and Xbox. Just keep in mind that you might need to format the drive for your specific system. Often, they’ll be designated to work with a specific platform and sometimes they come with backup software that’s platform-specific. Unless otherwise indicated, all the PC drives mentioned here are compatible with Windows but can be formatted for Mac. Plus, many of them include USB-C and USB-A cables or adapters. If they don’t happen to be included, you can easily buy dongles for about $12.
Console gamers will want to keep an eye out for platform-specific details. For example, the PS5 lets you store and play PS4 games from an external drive but not PS5 games. The Xbox Series X, on the other hand, can store Series X games on an external hard drive, but you’ll have to transfer them to internal storage before playing them. Both consoles will let you expand internal storage. The Xbox Series X uses a proprietary Seagate-made storage expansion card, and the PS5 uses a more standard M.2 SSD.
With those caveats in mind, our current top picks for the best external hard drive and external solid-state drive are below. These (or nearly identical models with less storage capacity) have been used or anecdotally tested by CNET editors. We’ll update our list of the best external hard drives and SSDs as we test new products. Ideally, you should have redundant backups — either off-site or in the cloud — for important data and large files like family photos, in case of theft or fire. Make sure to encrypt your data, too.
Best external drives of 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 pricey. You’ll have to decide just what kind of performance you want and need based on your use case and the PC you have (to get the fastest transfer speed you need a computer with the latest USB technology). Unless you regularly transfer massive video files, you probably don’t need a “pro” level storage device. Note that even the slowest SSDs tend to be about five times as fast as a traditional mechanical drive.
Compatibility
Most external drives are compatible with a wide variety of computers, including Macs, Windows PCs and Chromebooks. Things get more complicated when you get into the realm of game consoles. To store PS5 or Xbox Series X or S games, you’ll need to purchase a drive specifically for that task. You can use most external drives to store and play PS4 games or standard Xbox One games (off the drive), but you’ll need to install an internal drive to store and play PS5 games. Xbox Series X and S machines require you to buy either the WD Black C50 expansion card or Seagate Storage expansion card to store and play Xbox Series X or S games.
Security
Some of you may be storing sensitive data on your external storage drive. If that’s the case, look for drives that include security features, including encryption.
We test external drives based on three key criteria, comparing similarly styled and priced models. These criteria are design, performance and value.
- Design: We assess not only the size and weight of the drive (portability factors) but its overall build quality and durability, including water-, shock- and dust resistance.
- Performance: We evaluate read/write performance by transferring 50GB of files to and from both a PC and a Mac computer multiple times. We also evaluate how much a drive heats up.
- Value: We compare drives with similar performance specs against each other and assess how good a value they are based on their price for the same capacity drive.
Many drives are plug-and-play, but you may have to format a drive for your particular operating system. Some drives come with their own software utilities to set up the drive for whatever operating system you’re using.
Most of today’s drives use USB-C interfaces and often come with a USB-C-to-USB-A adapter that allows you to connect the drive to older USB-A ports. To get maximum speeds, you’ll need to connect the drive via USB-C.
USB-C connectors have four metal pins that are used to transfer data. They are sometimes referred to as “lanes.” USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) and USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) use one TX lane to transmit data and one RX lane to receive data. Most of the latest computers offer at least those speeds, and more computers are getting USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, which offers up to two lanes of 10 Gbps operation for a theoretical 20Gbps data transfer rate.
USB4 and Thunderbolt ports (Macs use Thunderbolt) allow you to transfer data as well as video and audio. That means you can connect both external drives and displays. Thunderbolt/USB4 offers up to a 40Gbps theoretical data transfer rate. Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 ports look and act like USB-C ports and support USB-C connectivity. A computer with standard USB-C ports does not support Thunderbolt devices.
To get the fastest speeds, you typically need a compatible USB-C cable (the drive should come with the right cable to maximize data transfer rates). A Thunderbolt-compatible cable is required for computers equipped with Thunderbolt ports to achieve a maximum data transfer speed. Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 ports look like USB-C ports and use a cable that looks like a USB-C cable but has a Thunderbolt insignia on it. Earlier Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 ports used their own type of connector (the port also accommodates a Mini DisplayPort cable for connecting to monitors). You can buy an adapter that converts a Thunderbolt 2 cable to Thunderbolt 3 and 4. There are also USB-C to Mini DisplayPort cables.
Enlarge Image
USB types and theoretical burst transfer speeds.
Kingston