These feature 2.5in, 5,400rpm drives of the sort we used to see in laptops, housed in a toughened casing and using a single USB connection for both power and data transfer. Today, external drives come in three basic forms, the biggest and most popular category of which is the portable HDD. How to choose the best external hard drive for you What type of drive should I buy? They’re still brilliant for backups and archives, or even just storing games that you’re not planning to play right now. However, external HDDs still have their place, giving you 2TB to 4TB of storage (or more!) at a significantly lower price. External SSDs are now in the mainstream, giving you high speeds at 1TB to 2TB capacities without breaking the bank. The answer to these problems is an external drive. You might be tempted to use cloud storage but, while it is a great way to backup vital files, it’s not always practical when you have a lot of data or large media files that you need to safeguard. If you play games you can see 1TB go in just a handful of titles, with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War grabbing between 150 and 250GB on their own. That’s a problem when even budget smartphones can produce photos that take up 10 to 16MB of space, and hi-res audio files and 4K video files are even greedier. In fact, the recent shift from HDDs (hard disk drives) to SSDs (solid state drives) has meant that space has never been so tight – 256GB SSDs are still common, and only high-performance laptops and gaming PCs ship with 1TB or more.

While computers keep growing ever more powerful, their storage never quite maintains the same pace.

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