Buying the best external hard drive for your needs is one of the most important things you could do to ensure that your precious data is secure. External hard drives remain the most affordable way to truly secure your virtual belongings, offering you high storage capacities to save pretty much all of your data. By saving your data to an external hard drive, rather than to the cloud, you are in complete control over how your data is secured, and who has access to it. There's no annoying subscriptions to pay for either.

External hard drives are also great ways to easily upgrade the storage capacities of your devices. The best external drives will be portable, with large capacities and robust designs that keeps your data safe when they are being moved around. The question remains, however: how do you know which external HDD fits your needs – will it be the modest, yet compact ADATA SD700 or the whopping 20TB WD My Book Duo?

Here we'll discuss the top external hard drives that are both powerful and premium. Let’s begin, shall we? • Want to avoid local storage altogether? Find out how to 1. Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC. Not the fastest drive An external hard drive you can buy without breaking the bank, Buffalo's MiniStation Extreme NFC could be your match made in heaven. With compatibility for both Mac and Windows machines, the Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC is very flexible, and comes with a rugged case that's dust and water resistant, along with a built-in USB 3.0 cable.

Not only is your data kept protected from knocks and drops with the rugged shell, but it's also got 256-bit AES security features and NFC (Near Field Communication) features as well. Essentially it allows you to unlock the drive to get to your files quickly and easily by tapping the supplied NFC card onto the drive's body. Western Digital My Passport 4TB. WD backup software is basic The latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport range of external hard drives has landed, coming in sizes from 1TB to 4TB. It features cloud storage and 256-AES encryption, along with WD's own backup software. Best of all, it is a very good performer when it comes to data transfer speeds, beating many of its competitor.

Best Mac External Hard Drive We spent over 30 hours researching and testing 20 different external hard drives and found that HDD capacity, warranty, and backup speed were most important. The Western Digital External hard drive scored high marks in every category and is our top pick. Best external hard drives for Macs 2018. Western Digital My Passport 4TB. A brilliant external hard drive for Mac or PC. Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt. A brilliant Thunderbolt external hard drive. G-Technology G-Drive USB 3.0 4TB. Samsung T3 SSD. Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC. Seagate Innov8 8TB. LaCie Porsche. Apps for movie online watch for mac.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn't reach the top speeds of solid state external drives, but for external hard drives based on traditional HDDs, this is the drive to get. Adata SD700 External SSD. No USB Type-C The Adata SD700 will suit those looking for a rugged storage device that can provide ample capacity without costing too much. It performs superbly well and remains the only SSD we’ve seen that is IP68 rated.

Thanks to the solid state drive that resides in this external hard drive, it's a lot faster than external drives that use traditional spinning hard drives - so you're getting great transfer speeds as well as rugged protection. It also comes in capacities up to 1TB, so you don't have to worry about missing out on storage space just because it uses an SSD - this drive really does hit all the right notes.

WD My Book Duo 16TB. Need two USB 3.0 ports free If you're looking for the absolute largest capacity external hard drive, then the WD My Book Duo 16TB is the one to get, offering a huge 16TB of storage space over two hard drives. If you don't mind sacrificing some of the ample storage space you can set the drives up in a RAID array, so you have file backups of your files should one of the drives die. This USB 3.0 drive has many of the features of a fully-fledged NAS device (including a high price), and if you have a router with a USB 3.0 port you could use this as a network attached storage device in its own right. The device, which comes with two-year warranty, has 256-bit AES hardware encryption, and automatic backup software (WD SmartWare Pro).

Worth noting that the enclosure used is fully serviceable and that WD ships the drive already pre-formatted for Windows users (NTFS). Seagate Innov8 8TB. USB-C support still in infancy The Seagate 8TB Innov8 range is worth a mention. It is a normal-size 3.5-inch desktop hard disk drive but doesn't need an external power supply to run. Instead, it needs to be powered via a USB Type-C connector without which it won't work. It does pave the way for customers to move staggering amount of data around without being tethered.