External Hard Drive Ranking 2017

One of the main benefits of external hard drives is that they allow you to quickly store information via USB cable without having to shut down and open up the PC. They are also a lot bigger than flash drives as far as capacity goes, which explains why they’re so popular in the first place.

Article The Best External Hard Drives of 2017 compiled by Original article here Recommended stories The Best Gaming Monitors of 2017. Take your game to the next level with a monitor that's as powerful as your PC. Dozens of 2.5-inch drive enclosures can be found online for between $10-$25 (£15-25) that will let you drop in an old drive easily, and turn it into an external hard drive or SSD. Although a higher-capacity drive is more cost-effective per terabyte, 8 TB external desktop hard drives are nearly twice as expensive as 4 TB drives, for more storage than most people need.

Now, there are a few things to look for when shopping for an external hard drive, beginning with the hard drive’s capacity and transfer speed. You would also be advised to take portability into consideration, because at the end of the day, it’s supposed to be a portable device. To give you a better idea of what the market has to offer in this regard, we put together a list of the ten best desktop hard drives money can buy.

This highly portable drive may only have an 80GB capacity, but what it lacks in storage it makes up in portability. We say this because it employs a driver-free plug & play technology that enables you to connect it to virtually any desktop pc in just a matter of seconds. Interestingly enough, it also comes with a one-touch backup software designed to help you recover sensitive information before copying any files on or off the drive.

9Toshiba Canvio Connect II 1TB Portable Hard Drive

Toshiba’s Canvio Connect II uses a simple and intuitive user interface that makes it very easy to use. At the same time, it comes with a cloud-enabled backup option that allows you to backup data according to any pre-planned backup schedule you may choose. As for its capacity, let us point out that it allows you to store up to 1 TB of data, files you can transfer to it from both a PC or a MAC.

8Seagate Backup Plus 2TB Desktop External Hard Drive

What makes this particular drive stand out from the rest is the fact that it comes with 200 GB of free OneDrive cloud storage that you can use to store any sensible information at any given time. In terms of data transferring, we should point out that this drive uses a USB 3.0 connectivity feature, one that allows you to transfer files at twice the speed you normally would on a regular drive.

7Silicon Power 1TB Rugged Armor A30 External Drive

External hard drive ranking 2017 pdf

This military grade portable drive is one of the toughest, most reliable external hard drives the market has to offer. As such, it features a shockproof construction that will help the drive withstand any sudden shocks that would otherwise damage regular drives. It also uses a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connectivity with a high transferring rate of up to 5 GB/sec, which is quite impressive by all standards.

Transcend’s StoreJet M3 hard drive uses an advanced 3-stage shock protection system, which when combined with the drive’s durable anti-shock rubber outer case, makes it one of the toughest external drives out there. Furthermore, it features an advanced internal hard drive suspension system with a quick reconnect button that allows you to quickly and safely reconnect the drive without undergoing any unplugging / reinserting procedure.

This drive will not only allow you to quickly and safely store files on it in a timely fashion, but it will do so while providing you with a multitude of backup settings for you to choose from. Among them, the ability to secure your backups with password-protected data encryption along with the capacity to store and access files from your PC without reformatting. Also worth mentioning is that this drive uses a very simple and intuitive user interface to make things easier when connecting it to your computer.

External Hard Drive Ranking 2017 Pdf

4Seagate Expansion 5TB Desktop External Hard Drive

Thanks to its SuperSpeed USB 3.0 capabilities, this particular drive is capable of reaching formidable transfer speeds through a fairly standard USB connection. It also doesn’t require any software to be installed on your computer for the file transfer to work due to its plug & play design. This being said, let us point out that Mac compatibility requires reformatting the drive so as to erase all Windows files.

3WD 1TB Black My Passport Ultra Portable External Hard Drive

It is important for any external hard drive to be compatible with a variety of operating systems, which is what makes this drive stand out. You see, the WD 1 TB My Passport Ultra will work just fine on Windows 8, 7, or even Vista if required right out of the box without the use of any additional software. Not only that but it also comes with an automatic local and cloud backup and an optional 256-bit AES hardware encryption feature for good measure.

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Similar to the ‘Ultra Portable’ version, the WB My Passport drive is perhaps one of the very best money can buy. The reason we say this is because it not only features a sleek compact design that vastly improves its portability, but it also stores up to 1 TB of data at a truly remarkable speed. Speaking of which, this drive has a data transfer rate via USB 3.0 that can reach 5 Gbps.

1Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB Portable External Hard Drive

It should be said that you aren’t likely to find a better external hard drive in this price range than Seagate’s Backup Plus Slim 1TB drive. One of the reasons why this particular hard drive is so impressive is that it comes with 200GB of free OneDrive cloud storage on top of the 1TB of data it can physically store. Not only that but it is also a very high-tech drive in its own right, seeing how it doesn’t require any power supply or any additional software to run properly.