The portable hard drive is one of the best things that has ever happened to us. You get to store all your data in one small compact drive that you can carry around. Over the years, hard drives have evolved considerably. They offer hundreds of gigabyte storage but obviously cannot rival the amount of storage provided by non-portable ones. They are created with the purpose of carrying not too large but considerably large amount of data wherever you want. Here, we have listed down the 10 best portable external hard drives. Have a look!
10. LaCie Rugged External Hard Drive ($99.99)
This external hard drive by LaCie is compatible with USB 2.0/3.0. It has a built-in password protection. The USB 3.0 makes it four times faster than its previous version. Can survive a drop of 4 feet and is dust and water resistant. The drive can easily take in rough handling and can be used for traveling. It backs up the data quickly and is super sturdy.
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9. Silicon Power External Hard Drive ($62.99)
This is a 1 TB shock and waterproof portable hard drive. It supports USB 3.0 enabling high-speed data transfer. The cable wraps around the hard drive, hence making it compact and handy to use. It might, for some devices, become undetectable that can be a real pain. The casing is made up of metal with plastic on the sides of it. The rubber seal makes it waterproof. The drive feels solid in hand. Really fast and highly recommended!
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8. Sabrent External Hard Drive ($22.99)
This hard drive supports all 2.5 and 3.5 inches SATA drives up to 8 TB+. USB attached SCSI protocol improves the speed of data transfer. The serial attachment bus has a signal bandwidth of 6 Gbps for enabling fast storage backup. It is a plug-and-play device having compatibility with multiple OS. The fan in it might be useless because the grills on the top and bottom have too fine holes in them to allow air to flow through them freely. Simple and easy to use with fast speed.
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7. Toshiba External Hard Drive ($54.99)
This is Toshiba’s 1 TB portable hard drive. The transfer rate goes up to 5 GB/s. It is also compatible with USB 3.0, hence increasing the speed of transfer. Smudge resistant design keeps it clean. Doesn’t need any plug-ins or drivers to work. Great plug and play device. The delivery is fast and has a lot of space.
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6. Silicon Power External Hard Drive ($65.85)
This is Silicon Power’s 1 TB rugged and shockproof 2.5 inches hard drive. The drop protection meets US military standards. The cable wraps around the disc, hence making it extremely handy to use. The device might randomly disconnect sometimes. It can also use other cables conveniently without worrying about the compatibility. Slim and portable!
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5. Transcend External Hard Drive ($56.99)
This hard drive is a military grade shock resistant portable drive. It supports USB 3.0 and is also backward compatible. It has an advanced internal hard drive suspension system and a quick-reconnect button to remove USB hard disk safely without unplugging and reinserting it again and again. It also has a one-touch auto-backup button. The power cable only needs to be plugged when the machine is unable to provide enough power. It comes formatted as FAT32 that need to be reformatted as NTFS if you want to transfer large files.
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4. Samsung External Hard Drive ($169.99)
This hard drive has internal SSD level performance. Super fast reading and writing speed up to 450 MB/s. It is shock resistant and has secure encryption for safety purposes. Super fast and great portable storage product!
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3. Seagate External Hard Drive ($117.99)
This is a 4 TB external portable hard drive. Simple plug and play device that is compatible with USB 2.0 and 3.0. This drive uses a simple cable for making power and data connection.
“I highly recommend your read BlackBlaze’s article “What Hard Drive Should I Buy?” They take data from a server farm and construct a graph to show fail rates. Generally speaking, Seagate hard drive has a high failure rate, but at random intervals. Whereas Western Digital’s will generally fail within the first few months, but once the weak ones are dead the rest do pretty okay.” – Amazon’s Customer Review.
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2. Seagate Backup External Hard Drive ($88.98)
This is a 2 TB portable external hard drive from Seagate. For plugging it in MAC, you need to format it. Quick file transfer. Slim with fast read/write speed. This drive is housed inside an attractive aluminum metal case with a plastic bottom that gives a solid feel to the drive.
” While the Seagate Dashboard software that is pre-loaded on the hard drive includes very useful and flexible backup software, the other two parts of the software to share files to social media sites and save files from social media sites are limited in their usefulness and flexibility.” – Amazon’s Customer Review
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1. Passport Western Digital External Hard Drive ($59.00)
1 TB ultra-portable hard drive by Western Digital is one of the best sellers. It comes in capacity sizes that are: 1.5,1,2,3,4 TB, and 500 GB. It has an optional 256-bit AES hardware encryption and automatic local and cloud backup. It comes formatted for windows. For MAC compatibility, this hard drive requires re-formatting.
Available here
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