For more helpful articles, coverage, and answers to common questions about Windows 10, visit the following resources: Provided you have a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2×2 PC or laptop you can expect read speeds in excess of 1700MB/sec, with write speeds around 30MB/sec slower. Over a straight USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection, both read and write speeds stabilise at around 965MB/sec, which isn’t a massive improvement over 2020’s 1050MB/sec model. Yet it’s the random read/write speeds that are really impressive, reaching up to 206MB/sec and 226MB/sec, making this a good drive for apps and games as well as media. Looking for maximum performance for your most demanding applications? This is one of the strongest options. If you know that the drive is working correctly, but it won't show up in File Explorer, the drive could be trying to use a letter already in use by another device or the drive letter may be missing. While Toshiba sells a gaming-specific version of its Canvio external HDD, the Canvio Flex is the current king when it comes to price, performance and value. It’s cheaper than most competitors, yet also one of the fastest portable HDDs we’ve tested. Our PC benchmarks place its sequential read/write speeds over a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A connection at 151.5MB/sec and 158.9MB/sec, and there’s precious little in it between the Canvio Flex and Canvio Gaming when it comes to random read/write speeds. Plugged into the Xbox Series X, it’s very competitive with the Seagate FireCuda Gaming Hard Drive, taking four seconds longer to load a saved game in Prey, but coming first by just under three seconds in Red Dead Redemption 2. You can also save a minute or so over slower drives when it comes to moving or copying installed games. Sure, it’s nowhere near as speedy as an SSD, but if you just want a drive for archiving Series S/X games and playing your old Xbox One favourites, this could be all you need. Get fast NVMe™ solid state performance featuring 1050MB/s 2 read and 1000MB/s 2 write speeds in a portable, high-capacity drive that’s perfect for creating amazing content or capturing incredible footage.

Hard drives may get you more capacity for your dollar by far, but first you need to consider a major difference in external storage these days: the hard drive versus the SSD. Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. The storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.) We hooked up each external hard drive to a current-generation Dell XPS 17 laptop, using the best connection interface available to that drive, always in the same port, to minimize performance differentials. The SSD controller and the NAND Flash memory used are unknown; however, we’d assume that it shares some DNA with the SN530, Western Digital’s entry level NVMe platform.

The best external hard drives you can buy in 2023

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: A full install of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II with the Warzone 2.0 Battle Royale mode will take well over 100GB on the internal SSD. Ditto for Forza Horizon 5. Go for this year’s big exclusive, Starfield, and you’re looking at around 125GB. Sign up to Xbox Games Pass and make use of its extensive library, and you could see your available storage space reduced to zero before you know it. The drive is a shade expensive, and the integrated carrying loop is too big to easily fit on a standard keychain.Otherwise, this is an excellent storage device that's ideal for heavy everyday use.

For mechanical hard disks, the very fastest drives max out at 2Gbits/sec so there’s no need to go beyond USB 3.2 Gen 1. Are there any extra features worth having? Open the enclosure and disconnect the drive. Then, connect the drive to your desktop or laptop, following the manufacturer's instructions. We devote hundreds of hours of rigorous testing to help make sure your drive is worthy of your best work — and so you know your precious files are in good hands.

The best external drives for Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S

Perhaps the only thing you don't need to pay all that much attention to is the warranty. Sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps? Sure, a long warranty is nice. But if your drive breaks because you dropped it, the warranty likely won't cover that, anyway. Even if the drive fails because of a manufacturing defect, most warranties simply replace the drive and don't cover the cost of recovery services that attempt to rescue your data from the broken drive. The real value lies in what's on your drive, not the drive itself.

For capacity, traditional hard drives (HDDs) offer a lot more options, but SSDs are generally able to house the same amount of storage in a smaller amount of space. After completing the steps, you should be able to start using the storage as usual. If you can't get the storage online, and it was recently available, that could mean the drive is corrupted, disconnected, or it's not getting power. Fixing drive status unreadable But with square corners and an antiquated, two-tone design, the drive isn’t a looker. And it finished near the bottom of all of our performance tests.

Thank you!

Windows 10 only recognizes drives using a supported file system (NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, or ReFS). If you're connecting a drive formatted using a different OS (macOS or Linux) with an unsupported file system, it won't appear on your computer. In this case, the solution is to format the drive using a supported file system. When used with a USB Type-C cable, the SanDisk Extreme rises above the competition with some stellar numbers. The design and form factor are spot on and while we have one reservation regarding the bundled cable, you can’t go wrong at this price. Just make sure you get an enclosure that matches your drive, be that SATA or NVMe. And also keep in mind that DIY external drives usually aren't sealed, so they're not as likely to stand up to dust and dampness as well as external SSDs and portable hard drives that are designed to do so. Finding Discounts on the Best External Storage Drives

If Windows 10 doesn't detect the drive correctly, and it appears in Disk Management with the Unreadable status, you're experiencing read and write errors, corruption, or hardware failure. Once you've completed these steps, Windows 10 should detect and configure the drive automatically. Wrapping things up In a bigger-picture sense, SSDs (which have no moving parts) have largely made the notion of a "fast" hard drive a bit old-fashioned. Even the slowest external SSD is faster than a 7,200rpm hard drive, often several times over, depending on what you're transferring and measuring.We saw some good numbers here, with the caveat that the Type-C connector – not Type-A – was used. This little SanDisk product outperformed all non-Thunderbolt 3 drives we’ve tested with CrystalDiskMark, delivering nearly 560MBps in terms of read speed and just over 500MBps in write. A 100GB file was transferred in 294 seconds, which equates to a transfer rate of about 334MBps. Beyond that, USB 3.2 (the speed specification) comes in two primary (and one rarer) flavors as of this writing: "Gen 1" and "Gen 2." The iteration called "USB 3.2 Gen 2" has a maximum theoretical interface speed of 10Gbps. (Few single external devices can saturate that interface, even most solid-state drives.) "USB 3.2 Gen 1," on the other hand, is identical in maximum potential speed to old, familiar USB 3.0. (Confusing, we know.) There's also the uncommon 20Gbps "USB 3.2 Gen 2x2," an interface found in some high-speed external SSDs and using USB Type-C ports exclusively. To get its full speed benefits, you need a computer that specifically supports it, or else need to get a compatible expansion card or motherboard. This new drive from Toshiba has a few advantages over older favourites from Seagate And Western Digital. First, it’s relatively fast by HDD standards, with sequential read speeds of over 150MB/sec and write speeds of 160MB/sec. It’s actually a smidgen faster than the excellent Canvio Gaming. And while its random read/write speeds aren’t anything to write home about, they’re no worse than those of comparable drives, and we’d recommend an SSD these days for actively running Windows apps or games.