To spot any widespread reliability issues, we read through Amazon reviews for each of the drives we tested and counted the number of reported drive failures. The new 2 TB model showed promise in our speed tests, but it has the same small-review-pool problem as the latest Seagate models. The Seagate Backup Plus Slim is formatted as exFAT, ensuring compatibility with Chromebooks, Macs, PCs, and most recent Linux PCs, so you can copy files between computers regardless of the operating system. The Slim comes with Seagate’s Toolkit program, which you can also download from the company’s support site. In our awesomeness score Seagate Backup Plus Hub ranks #46 out of 145 and WD My Book ranks #53 out of 145. To get real-world examples of how long it takes to transfer files back and forth between a computer and each drive, we also timed the file transfer of a 32 GB music folder (with 6,154 MP3 files) and a folder with two large files (an 8.1 GB MKV video file and a 7.07 GB Linux ISO file) using Windows’ built-in Robocopy utility. At the end of 2016, we tested three promising, affordable rugged hard drives: the Silicon Power Armor A80, Silicon Power Armor A65, and Silicon Power Armor A85. You should consider replacing your backup drives before they fail; between three and six years is a good time to consider a replacement, depending on your risk tolerance. Like its smaller cousin above, this external hard drive is fast and backed by the … You can read a more in-depth explanation of the program at the HD Tune website. And if you want to throw it in your bag (carefully), that shouldn’t be a problem. Seagate Backup Plus Fast: STDA4000100 (4tb) This is a duo drive that is partly compatible with PS4. The 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is the best portable hard drive for most people because it’s reliable, and because it’s lighter and smaller than most of the other hard drives we tested. The new version of the Seagate Backup Plus Slim is an update to the same drive we’ve recommended for the past five years, and it’s the only portable hard drive we’ve tested that doesn’t sacrifice size, speed, or reliability. WD Easystore Desktop is a well-known option on the higher end of the price range. Go to awesomeness ranking Go to consumer score ranking Seagate Backup Plus Hub … 7. We saw this behavior during our Robocopy tests, when the file transfer rate for FAT drives dropped by two-thirds compared with the NTFS-formatted drives. Our read test transfers files from the drive to the PC, while our write test goes in the opposite direction. All three drives are rated to survive at 1 meter (about 3.3 feet) underwater for up to 30 minutes and are rated to survive 26 drops on their various surfaces from 4 feet, but in our real-world testing none of them survived these conditions. For faster storage that you access all the time, consider a more expensive portable solid-state drive instead. This cutting edge drive is the biggest drive I have seen hit the consumer market at an affordable price. If you are considering purchasing an external hard drive, the following Seagate… When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. After 12 hours of research and testing, we found that the new version of the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is the best portable hard drive for most people. Removing the cover of the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB, we found a 2.5” Seagate/Samsung hard disk drive, model ST2000LM003. Transcend’s 2 TB StoreJet 25M3 is larger, heavier, and more expensive per terabyte than our top pick, the Seagate Backup Plus Slim. The Seagate Expansion is a decent choice if you want to expand your gaming console’s storage or don’t need software, but the Seagate Backup Plus Slim was faster in our tests and costs the same per terabyte. Posted by. In our tests, the Slim transferred data at about 125 MB/s, measurably faster than the Seagate and Western Digital 4 TB drives we tested. Having both onsite and cloud backups ensures that your data stays safe from localized threats such as fire, theft, or natural disaster, as well as from internet outages or disruptions to the cloud backup provider. Even so, the Backblaze study is the largest, most recent sample of hard drive failures we have access to, and it’s always a fascinating read. If you can afford to pay two to three times more for a smaller, lighter, more durable, and much faster portable drive, we recommend a portable solid-state drive. From desktop hard drives to NAS to portable solid-state drives, we’ve spent hundreds of hours finding the best external drives for most people. The 8 TB WD Easystore was faster than both models by about 2 minutes. We don’t love its bright green color scheme for most people. It's in the top 3 bestselling external hard drives and has dozens of popular alternatives in the same price range, such as WD Black P10 or Avolusion HDDGU3 . We don't know any external hard drives that are newer on the market. Even if you have only a terabyte of data right now, your needs will expand over the drive’s lifespan, and having room to grow is better than needing to buy multiple drives (which costs more in the long run). Select “WD Element / WD Easystore” on the right end. Seagate also includes a simple backup utility and subscriptions to photo software. If you frequently move between different locations and need a drive to keep in your bag—to back up photos, extend your music library, or keep your work data separated from your personal data, for example—you should get a portable external drive like the one we recommend in this guide. It measures less than half an inch thick—0.46 inch, to be exact—and it weighs just 4.5 ounces, so it’s easy to carry during your commute. For each portable hard drive, we ran HD Tune Pro, a benchmarking program that tests sequential transfer speeds and random access time across the entire disk. Although the option to encrypt would be nice, its absence isn’t a dealbreaker for most people. : It supports a 500 GB to 4 TB storage capacity, which in turn allows you to keep your mandatory data applications and digital library safe. 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