Best External Hard Drive 2019 Quick List:

Welcome to the wtg guide for the Best External Hard Drive 2019. If you are one of today’s mobile warriors, you may need an external hard drive to match your work or personal style. External hard drives can also be useful for essentially anyone looking to easily add storage to a computer. No need to remove screws or look for space within a computer’s chassis. Useful for video game consoles and tablets as well. Take a look to see how these portable external hard drives measure up for daily use, storage capacity, performance, and physical size, and determine which one will work for you.

Best External Hard Drive 2019

For the money, you cannot go wrong with the Western Digital external hard drive. It is backed by one of the most established manufacturers and comes with a healthy two-year manufacturer’s limited warranty. This WD external hard drive works with both Mac and PC. It has a sleek minimalist appearance and is available in multiple colors.

Take a Look: Western Digital 4TB External Hard Drive

Best External Hard Drive 2019

This Samsung drive fits in the palm of your hand, and is enclosed in a full metal jacket. It offers optional password protection and AES 256-bit hardware encryption. It includes USB Type C to C and USB Type C to A cables, and comes with a three-year warranty. This SSD (Solid State Drive) works with Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), Android 4.4 (KitKat) or higher. I’ve you want maximize performance, this is definitely worth a look.

Take a Look: Samsung External Hard Drive SSD

Best External Hard Drive 2019

There are so many flavors of Seagate external drives that you literally can browse page after page. We keep coming back to this external hard drive for its generous range of storage capacity. It works well on a Mac or PC, and gets its power from the USB cable so you do not need external power, which is helpful when on the road.

Take a Look: Seagate External Hard Drive

Best External Hard Drive 2019

This Kingston Digital external hard drive is a miniaturization marvel. This is probably the tiniest large drive you could get—in a thumb drive form. It is roughly 3 inches by 1 inch by 1 inch. 2-terabyte capacity storage in your closed hand. It has superfast speeds of 300MB/s read and 200MB/s write. According to Kingston, that’s 70 hours of 4K footage. It comes in a high-end protective zinc alloy metal casing.

Take a Look: Kingston Digital External Hard Drive

Best External Hard Drive 2019

No, this SanDisk drive does not come with a carabiner for clipping it to your backpack, but it does have the loop. If you need a lot of space in a tough package that will fit easily in your pocket, this is the drive.

Take a Look: Sandisk External Hard Drive

What is an External Hard Drive?

An external drive is just a hard drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) that is connected to a computer on the outside rather than on the inside.

Some external drives draw power over their data cable, which of course comes from the computer itself, while others may require an AC wall connection to derive power on their own.

One way to think of an external hard drive is as if it were a regular, internal hard drive that has been removed, covered in its own protective casing, and plugged into the outside of your computer.

Internal hard drives can even be converted into external hard drives via what’s called a hard drive enclosure.

External hard drives come in varying storage capacities, but they all connect to a computer either by USB, FireWire, eSATA, or wirelessly.

External hard drives are sometimes called portable hard drives. A flash drive is one common, and very portable, type of external hard drive.

Why Would You Use an External Drive?

External hard drives are portable, easy to use, and can provide a large amount of storage whenever you need it. You can store the actual device any place you like, and carry a large number of files with you wherever you go.

Another advantage of owning an external drive is that you can move them from computer to computer, making them great for sharing large files.

Because of their usually large storage capacities (often in the terabytes), external hard drives are often used to store backed up files. It’s common to use a backup program to back up things like a music, video, or picture collection to an external drive for safe keeping, separate from the originals in case they’re accidentally changed or deleted.

Even if not used for backup purposes, external hard drives provide an easy way to expand your existing storage without having to open up your computer, which is especially difficult if using a laptop.

If your computer is always giving you low disk space warnings or is sluggish because it’s working hard to keep things running on the little bits of free space it has left, it’s probably time to get an external hard drive so that you can copy some of your files to it and free up storage on your primary hard drive.

External hard drive can also be used to provide additional storage to an entire network (though internal hard drives are usually more common in these scenarios). These kinds of network storage devices can be accessed by numerous users at once and often serve as a way for users to share files within a network to avoid emailing or uploading the data online.

Internal Drives Versus External Drives

Internal hard drives are connected directly to the motherboard, whereas external storage devices first run through the outside of the computer case, and then directly to the motherboard.

Operating systems and software installation files are generally installed to internal drives, while external hard drives are used for non-system files, like photos, videos, documents, and files of those types.

Internal hard drives draw power from the power supply inside a computer. External hard drives are powered either through their data cable or via dedicated AC power.

Data can be compromised much easier if it’s stored on an external hard drive because they’re generally located on a desk or table, making them very easy to pick up and steal. This is different than an internal hard drive where the entire computer has to be taken, or the hard drive removed from the inside, before someone can have physical access to your files.

External hard drives are also generally moved around more than internal ones, causing them to fail more easily due to mechanical damage. SSD based drives, like flash drives, are less prone to this sort of damage.

How to Use an External Hard Drive

Using an external hard drive is as easy as plugging one end of the data cable into the drive as well as to the matching end on the computer, like the USB port in the case of USB-based external drives. If a power cable is required, it will need to be plugged into a wall outlet.

Normally, on most computers, it takes just a few moments before the contents of the external drive will appear on-screen, at which point you can begin moving files to and from the drive.

When it comes to the software side of things, you can use an external hard drive in nearly the exact same way as you would an internal one. The only difference is how you access the drive in your operating system.

Since most computer systems have just one hard drive that serves as the primary, ‘main’ drive, it isn’t confusing to jump right in to to the hard drive to save files, copy files from one folder to another, delete the data, etc.

However, an external hard drive appears as a second hard drive and therefore is accessed in a slightly different manner. In Windows, for example, external drives are listed next to the other devices in Windows Explorer and Disk Management.

Ways to Put Your External Drive to Good Use

1. Store Backup Files

One of the most common ways to use an external drive is as storage to back up your digital data. If you don’t really trust cloud storage and prefer a physical device to keep your files in, use external drives instead.

External drives also help you safeguard your data while still managing to be locally connected. You can have your external drive plugged in constantly to serve as local storage of backup files.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket — try not to keep your important files in only one storage.

Having a local backup can help save you from the potential heartache of losing all of your original files from a virus or data corruption. Plus, unlike cloud storage, you don’t have to pay continuous costs just to store your backups.

This can even make data backups more convenient. Just look for a program compatible with your operating system that can automatically back up your computer’s data on an external drive.

2. Memory Archive for Digital Data

If you’re running out of storage space on your PC, maybe it’s time to let go of the nostalgic data we keep in there. All’s not lost though with an external drive.

Maybe you kept old photos or old work documents that you no longer have an immediate use for. You can use external drives to serve as an archive for your digital memories.

Just because we’re moving into modernity doesn’t mean we can’t be a little sentimental. External drives are the new and modern equivalent of the wallet you keep old tickets and photobooth pictures in.

Tip: You can organize different external drives by year. Label each hard drive depending on the year the files you’re storing are relevant to.

3. Play Games Anywhere

Sometimes you may find yourself in situations where you have more free time than anticipated. This is when games can come in handy, but what do you do if you don’t have your laptop or PC with you? This is where external drives can come in to save the day and take the boredom away. With an external drive, you can play your games anywhere you want as long as you have it. Just plug it into a computer and start playing. It can also be directly connected into a video game console.

4. Easily Share Data to Others

Make use of your wireless router’s USB ports to share files with people on your network. Just plug in your external drives to let them access your external drive’s contents.Instead of going from laptop to laptop for data transfer, you can do this instead. It’s a quicker and more convenient way of sharing your files.

An added benefit to sharing data via wireless connections is that you don’t have to deal with people who say they don’t have viruses on their computer… then you end up with an infected USB drive later on.

5. Expand Your Internal Memory

Aside from using external drives as local backups, you can use them as an extension or expansion of your internal storage. If you’re running out of room to place files that are still in active use, this is an alternate solution. Plus, if you feel that external hard disk is running out of space again, there is a simple solution. All you have to do is add another external drive.

6. Use as a Scratch Disk

A scratch disk is a drive that temporarily stores the data you need at the moment. Lots of programs make use of this, such as graphics editor Adobe Photoshop.

If you often use software that requires a scratch disk, you definitely consider external drives, which can be used for such a purpose. In this way, you could spare valuable local storage for files you’ll always need instead of wasting space on temporary needs.

7. Export iTunes Libraries

iTunes users can back up and export iTunes libraries on an external drive. It’s a fast way of transferring your music and preserving your playlists.

Not sure how to do it? Don’t fret because Apple has a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this.

8. Back Up Servers

When you need to recover lost data, local servers are where they are kept. But, what if servers themselves are compromised?

To be on the safe side, backing up the servers themselves is a good idea.

Keep the backed up server’s data at different locations as an added precaution. These storage drives will serve as your back up’s back up and is the best Plan C you can have.

However, note that different operating systems have different steps to back up a server on a hard drive. Check your OS first and find out what you need to do to back up your server.

9. Convert External Drives to Internal Ones

Depending on the physical and internal of your flash drive, you can use external drives as internal hard drives instead.

This actually makes a lot of sense if you’re using an external drive locally anyway. You might as well integrate it in your hardware to make it work faster and smoother.

Although it requires a little bit of tinkering and will probably void the manufacturer’s warranty, it’s still a pretty nifty trick and a convenient way of adding storage.

External hard disks have a lot of uses aside from being a file storage device. They can be used to transfer, preserve, and safeguard your files as well.

We hope this list has given you great ideas and a head start into figuring out what else to do with your external drives. Aside from the ideas mentioned on this list, you can probably come up with more ways of maximizing your external drive depending on your needs and computer usage.