10 best external hard drives and SSDs to supercharge your storage

Yes, it’s towards the top end of what you can expect to pay for an external storage, but this is a solid state drive, so it’s all that much faster. What you get for your slightly wince-inducing price point is an exercise in quietly impressive competence.

You don’t need any extra drivers to get going, and the solid aluminium construction helps keep the internal temperature down while protecting the innards properly. Data transfer speeds are, for a drive named “rocket”, appropriately stratospheric.

Western Digital’s my passport is just a little broader than a passport and available in sizes as thin as 13.8mm, so it’s one to bear in mind if you’re after something to take with you when you head for a work-from-café day.

Worried about what happens if you leave it lying around? It’s password-protected, so, should anyone plug your my passport into their machine, they’ll be greeted with instructions on what to do to return it to you. Plus, it comes in an array of six colours – and that’s about as exciting as external hard drives get. Mac users will need to get the dedicated my passport for Mac models, though (£69.99, Westerndigital.co.uk).

The little brother of Western Digital’s beefy elements SSD is a straight-down-the-line, no-frills model, which packs a hefty pound-for-pound storage to price ratio.

Slightly irritatingly, you’ll have to subscribe to WD’s automated back-up service to keep it after your 30-day trial, and there’s no encryption or password protection here. Nevertheless, if you want a cost-effective way to whack a load of photos and videos away safely, this is a solid option.

If you want an external SSD that works with your entire suite of gadgets, look no further than the slim and stylish Crucial X8 portable external SSD. It works with Windows 10, macOS, Linux, Chromebooks, the Apple iPad Pro, Android devices, as well as the PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One. This beauty of an SSD works with everything and everything, and, frankly speaking, we had difficulty finding a device with which it didn’t work.

It feels durable, and while it’s not the smallest or the lightest SSD, its speed is phenomenal, and we were pleased with how easy it was to use. The best part? It’s a fairly cheap bit of kit for an SSD that gets you storage sizes from 1TB and up. It does the job, and it does it well.

If you’re after something truly titchy, SanDisk’s extreme portable is a little longer than a credit card and clocks in at a shade over 40g. Pop a carabiner through its loop, hook it to your belt, and you’re away.

The rubberised cover is reassuringly tactile and prevents most minor bumps, and you’ll struggle to find a more straightforward piece of kit. Just plug in, install the security kit – which includes the ability to password protect your data – and drag and drop.

If your Xbox Series X is running out of space and you’re desperately trying to install Hogwarts Legacy onto your machine, we’d recommend getting the Seagate game drive SSD. It wouldn’t look out of place sitting on top of your Xbox Series X, with its compact all-black design. It’s an SSD, what do you expect?

It’s easy to set up, plugging neatly into the USB 3.0 port on your Xbox, and is portable enough to be brought to your mate’s house. Plus, this Seagate SSD comes with a limited-time subscription to Xbox Game Pass, meaning you can play more than 100 games absolutely free. While it’s designed for use with the Xbox, you can hook it up to your PC, too.

The “ATD” here stands for “all-terrain drive”, which makes it sound much more like it could compete in the Paris-Dakar Rally than seems likely. But the point is that this is an HDD that can take a battering.

It isn’t the fastest out there, but with three layers of shock resistance – an outer rubber bumper, aluminium casing that can withstand 1,000lb of crushing force, and internal shock mounts – it should stand up to the efforts of even the most hopelessly butterfingered digital archivist. Upload speeds are reliably swift, too.

Proving again that external hard drives needn’t be totally soulless, inscrutable bits of greyish metal, this is a gnarly-looking bit of kit with a performance to match.

Beyond its good looks, it can withstand a tumble to the floor from 1.5m, and can deal with being submerged in 2m of water for up to an hour. More than that, shock sensors inside the HD710 pro will stop any activity inside the hard drive if there’s a severe enough jolt. That means no damaged data and a longer life span for the mechanical parts. The cable holder that runs round the outside is neat, too.

You can never be too careful with your data, and as much as you might hope that a hard drive wouldn’t be of much interest to your common or garden thief, businesses and freelancers will feel a lot more secure knowing they’ve got something more substantial than crossed fingers keeping their secrets secret.

The T7 touch features fingerprint-recognition security and AES 256-bit encryption, and it’s slim enough to slip into a trouser pocket.

All right, this one’s not an external SSD, but Western Digital’s latest and greatest internal SSD is worth a mention. The SN850X is one powerhouse that’ll keep up with the performance of your PS5. Speeds on this thing are wild, featuring up to 7,300 MB/s with barely any load times.

You can get it with or without a heatsink, but if you get the model with the heatsink, games will continue to run at their peak throughout your sessions, drawing heat away from the machine. Installation can be a little fiddly, but after a 15-minute tinkering session, we were all set up, and able to launch games right from the SSD in a snap. It’s tiny, and light as a feather, too.