If you don’t need the extra features in backup software, setting it up on every computer you use isn’t worth the time and effort. Backup software is another nice perk, but you can find lots of free alternatives and great options among online backup services.

Nice-to-have features: Desktop drives generally have power switches so that you can be sure they’re off when you’re moving them, and these switches can also help the drives waste a little less energy when they aren’t in use in contrast, portable drives generally lack power switches.

Desktop drives may be less resistant to drops and are designed to be stationary,” a product expert from Western Digital told us. “Since portable drives are meant to be taken with you, they are designed to be more durable in terms of the everyday wear and tear of taking them along with you.

If you’re deciding between an external desktop hard drive and a portable hard drive, ask yourself how often you’ll be moving it around and how careful you are. Get an SSD if you want a drive that has extra protection against getting knocked around, and if you need speed. Durability: Hard drives contain physical moving parts, so they’re more prone to failure due to jostling or drops than solid state drives, which have no mechanical parts.

The best way to protect your files from being lost in a hard drive failure is to double up with a cloud backup service. We’ve also analyzed Backblaze’s hard drive failure reports, which have their own shortcomings. It’s difficult to get metrics on which hard drive models are more reliable over the long run, and though we’ve examined Amazon reviews to establish which drives have died more quickly for owners, there will always be outliers and failures that occur sooner than expected. If possible, try to replace your backup drives between the third and sixth years of use.

Reliability: All hard drives die eventually, but there’s no definitive answer on when that day will come.

Many desktop hard drives are available in capacities of 14 TB or more, but most people don’t need that much storage.

Capacity: We focus on 4 TB and 5 TB hard drives because of the balance they strike between value and total cost.

Price: Although we consider drives of all prices, we limit our testing to models priced below $150, and we compare their value on a dollar-per-terabyte basis.

Performance: We evaluate each drive with tests that replicate different real-world uses.

We dismiss drives built exclusively for Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 because they cost too much and don’t perform noticeably better for most people.

Input: We consider drives with a variety of USB port types-USB Type-B, Micro-B, or Type-C-but regardless of the port, we look at only those drives that support the most current USB standard, USB 3.2 Gen 2.

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