The 7 Best External Hard Drives of 2022 | Articles | Photo, video, optics

Fast, light, with plen­ty of stor­age — this is a list of sev­en exter­nal hard dri­ves that will ease the tedious process of back­ing up files.

Sam­sung T7 Touch Portable SSD

Samsung T5 Portable SSD 1TB

This lit­tle thing is a portable sol­id-state dri­ve (SSD) that uses USB 3.1 Gen 2 to deliv­er trans­fer speeds of up to 540MB/s, near­ly five times faster than exter­nal hard dri­ves (HDDs). The Sam­sung T5 is sol­id yet weighs around 51g and is 58mm thick. You can choose between 1TB or 2TB stor­age and one of four col­ors.

External hard drive WD My Book 4 TB

The WD My Book is a pow­er­ful and afford­able exter­nal hard dri­ve. It works best when paired with a desk­top com­put­er and can cre­ate full back­ups for both Win­dows and Apple sys­tems. Hard disk capac­i­ty — 4 TB. Hard­ware encryp­tion and secu­ri­ty soft­ware pro­tects your data. WD My Book also offers stor­age options up to 10TB.

SanDisk Extreme Portable 2TB

The San­Disk Extreme Portable SSD is great for back­ing up files on the go. Pock­et-sized and resis­tant to dust, water and drops — ide­al for trav­el­ers. San­Disk uses a USB 3.1 Type‑C con­nec­tor with oth­er cable adapters so you can con­nect to just about any­thing.

G‑Technology G‑Drive Mobile Pro 1TB

If you want to edit pho­tos or videos and work with an exter­nal hard dri­ve, G‑Technology G‑Drive Mobile Pro is made for you. The dri­ve uses a Thun­der­bolt 3 con­nec­tion for data trans­fer rates up to 2800MB/s. You can eas­i­ly edit 8K footage and write thou­sands of lines of code direct­ly from G‑Drive Mobile Pro. It also fea­tures drop pro­tec­tion up to three meters and high impact resis­tance.

LaCie Rugged Mini 5TB

This hard dri­ve has been a trust­ed friend to writ­ers for many years and still gets rave reviews. The Rugged Mini uses USB 3.0 for data trans­fer at about 130MB/s, so it’s not the fastest, but it’s afford­able, durable, light­weight, and offers plen­ty of stor­age.

Seagate Expansion 14TB Hard Drive

This is a great hard dri­ve option for desk­top PCs. It pro­vides users with 14TB of stor­age at an afford­able price. The dri­ve is ide­al for authors who spend most of their time in Pho­to­shop and video edit­ing and need a hard dri­ve where they can store their projects.

Samsung T7 Touch Portable SSD 1TB

The Sam­sung T7 Touch was hon­ored with the Inno­va­tion Award at CES 2020, and for good rea­son. The portable SSD has a fin­ger­print scan­ner to unlock the device and an LED ring to indi­cate that a back­up is in progress. It also uses USB 3.2 to pro­vide read speeds up to 1050MB/s and write speeds up to 1000MB/s.