Best External Hard Drives for 2026: Top SSDs for Storage and Backups

If you're running out of storage space on your laptop or need to back up your data or store that backlog of videos you're going to edit one day, an external hard drive can solve your problem. The trouble is, there are hundreds of drive options ranging from dirt cheap to crazy expensive, so how do you know which one is right for you? I've tested dozens, across operating systems and with different uses in mind, to find the best external hard drives for storage, backups, gaming, video editing, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, and more.

Check out our other guides, including How to Back Up and Move Your Photos Between Services, How to Back Up Your Digital Life, and How to Back Up Your iPhone. Updated July 2026: I've removed some discontinued drives and added the SanDisk G-Drive ArmorATD because, let's face it, with SSD prices climbing, spinning drives are much more compelling than they were a year ago. I've also updated prices and links throughout.

The AI race and its attendant flurry of memory-hungry data centers are causing prices to skyrocket, with apparently no end in sight. Drives in this guide have tripled in price in the past six months. For example, 8-TB SSDs are selling for more than the price of a new MacBook Air, which itself has gone up $200 to help cover surging memory costs.

You know what data centers don't seem to need, though? Spinning drives. While their prices have crept up some, these older drives remain affordable and are your best choice for backups anyway.

For incremental backups, which we recommend, speed isn't a huge factor. I have been using a variation of the Elements desktop hard drive to make backups of my data for more than a decade. These drives are big and require external power, but they're some of the cheapest and most reliable I've used.

Transfer speeds are not off the charts—the Elements drive I tested scored 120 megabytes per second (MB/s) for sequential writes on Windows—but again, you should ideally be running backups overnight, and even at these speeds the average PC backup will be done by morning. These drives use USB-C with support for USB 3, and I've had no problem using them with Windows, macOS, or Linux. Why this matters: The rising prices of SSDs and increasing demand for data storage are shifting the dynamics of the external hard drive market.

As data centers prioritize high-capacity storage solutions, consumers and businesses are left to navigate a complex landscape of choices. For those in need of reliable backups, spinning drives remain a cost-effective option, despite being slower. However, as AI and data-intensive applications continue to drive up memory costs, it's unclear how long these older drives will remain affordable.