The Best External Hard Drive of 2025
External desktop hard drives
The SanDisk Desk Drive is a speedy SSD made for desktop use. It has a power cord, which differentiates it from portable SSDs. The power adapter and cord can help with stability for daily backups and use with graphics workstations or gaming desktop PCs. However, if you’re simply just backing up or holding files for occasional use, our top hard-drive pick is over $100 cheaper and has double the storage space.
The Seagate One Touch Hub has USB-C and USB-A ports on its front panel, which are handy for charging mobile devices or connecting portable drives to your PC or Mac. This desktop drive was significantly slower in our testing than our portable hard drive pick. If you don’t need the extra connectivity, the WD Elements desktop drives listed above are less expensive for most capacities above 4 TB.
Buffalo’s DriveStation Velocity HD-LXU3 performed well in every test, but reliability was a common complaint in Amazon reviews.
We tested the Sandisk Professional G-Drive at a 12 TB capacity, and it tested faster than most of the other desktop drives, but it’s expensive, and it’s a specialized model for Mac media professionals. It comes formatted for Macs and works only with USB-C ports.
The Seagate Expansion drive performed fine in our large-file transfer tests but had the slowest speeds of any desktop drive we tested in our small-file transfer tests. It also disconnected itself from our PC without warning in the midst of a previous test session and failed to connect again afterward.
The WD My Book, a previous pick, didn’t stack up well against the models we tested more recently. In comparison, it produced slower transfer speeds across the board, and it took significantly longer to perform backups.
Portable hard drives
We tested the Seagate Ultra Touch as a competitor to the WD My Passport Ultra, but it has a shorter, two-year warranty compared with three years for our top pick. Its only outstanding feature is that the Ultra Touch is lighter than the WD, but 2 ounces is a negligible difference at this size. It’s fine as an alternative if the My Passport Ultra is out of stock.
LaCie’s Mobile Drive costs way too much for a drive that doesn’t offer unique benefits, and it performed atrociously in most of our testing. We also tested the newly redesigned and security-conscious LaCie Mobile Drive Secure, which performed better. But it’s physically larger than our picks, and it’s readily available only at Apple stores.
We dismissed the LaCie Rugged USB-C drive because it cost more than the LaCie Mobile Drive, and we expected that the performance would be comparable. If you’re drawn to a “rugged” drive, consider buying a portable SSD instead, since it lacks moving parts and will survive rough handling better than most hard drives.
The Toshiba Canvio Flex was a pick in a previous version of this guide. The Canvio Flex and Canvio Advance Plus come with USB-A and USB-C cables, but both drives still have a Micro-B connector on the body. The more durable USB-C port and the higher capacity of our new pick, the Western Digital My Passport Ultra, make it a more attractive option.
The Toshiba Canvio Gaming has firmware to improve performance when it’s attached to a game console, but in our standard testing it produced mediocre results. If you find it on sale, it isn’t the worst portable drive you can buy.
This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Arthur Gies.
