A 2TB drive priced at $120, for instance, would have a cost-per-gigabyte of 6 cents (most hard-drive manufacturers advertise 2 terabytes to be equal to 2000 gigabytes, even though 2048GB is more accurate). The best way to evaluate a drive’s price tag is to measure its cost per gigabyte. Western Digital covers its Passport drives with a three-year limited warranty.Ĭost Higher-capacity drives cost more than lower-capacity drives. Seagate offers a limited warranty of two years on most of its portable drives. Make sure the drive you buy is covered by a solid warranty. Some drives use numeric keypads to authorize access others have fingerprint readers. Most drives with “secure” branding do both. The best ones have a cable pass-through so you don’t need to take them out of the case to use them.ĭata security If you’re security-conscious, consider a hard drive that must be unlocked before you can use it, or one that automatically encrypts the data stored on it (and decrypts it when accessed by an authorized user). Some manufacturers offer optional external cases to protect their drives. Oddly enough, despite being an Intel technology, Thunderbolt ports are rare on the PC front-especially on laptops. Thunderbolt is the fastest hard-drive interface, and it’s very popular on the Mac platform.

It’s ubiquitous on new PCs, and it’s backward-compatible with USB 2.0 on older models. Interface USB 3.0 is the ideal portable hard-drive interface for PC users. SSDs aren’t impervious to shocks, but they don’t have any moving parts. Media A platter-based portable hard drive will typically deliver more capacity at a lower cost-per-gigabyte than one based on a solid-state drive, but it will also be slower and more susceptible to damage if it’s dropped. If the drive you want is available formatted only HTFS+, you’ll need to take the time to reformat it.

Macs use the HTFS+ file system, so manufacturers sometimes offer a different SKU for each platform (or they might provide a pre-loaded NTFS driver for Mac users). Platform If you’re buying a portable hard drive for a PC, buy one that’s pre-formatted NTFS. Seagate’s Backup Plus Fast is a great choice for making backups. SSDs perform at a much higher level than mechanical drives, but they’re also considerably more expensive.

Best portable hard drives