In an age of 4TB SSDs and massive NVMe drives, many users tend to leave the entire storage space as a single, huge system drive. While this is convenient, from an administrative point of view it is a risky move that amounts to flying blind. Instead, we recommend strategically partitioning your largest drives.
This brings tangible benefits for data security, system recovery, and backup efficiency. Think of partitions as digital firewalls within your hardware. If your operating system becomes corrupted by a faulty driver, a failed update, or even malware, a clean reinstallation is often the quickest way back to a stable system.
However, if you’ve stored everything on a single partition, you’ll have to laboriously back up terabytes of data before reinstalling, or risk losing it when formatting the drive.
By separating the operating system onto partition C: and your user data onto partition D:, you can completely wipe and reinstall Windows, while your game collections, video projects, and documents on the second partition remain completely untouched. This not only saves time but also spares you a lot of stress in crisis situations.
You should partition high-capacity drives – for greater data security, more efficient backups and easier system recovery.
Kingston
To implement this optimization, you must first analyze your current configuration. To do this, open the Command Prompt with administrator rights and enter the command fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo C:, then press the Enter key to confirm. Look for the value ‘Bytes per cluster’ in the results.
By default, Windows uses 4KB, which is ideal for the system partition to minimize fragmentation when dealing with many small system files. However, for data-only partitions where you mainly store large files such as 4K videos or backups, it makes sense to adjust the cluster size to 64KB.
Here’s how to do it: The neatest way to change the cluster size in Windows 11 is via Windows Settings. Press the Windows + I key combination to open Settings. In the left-hand menu, navigate to ‘System’ and then click on ‘Storage’ on the right. Scroll down to the ‘Storage management’ section.
A size of 4KB is ideal for system partitions. However, if the partition is to be used as a data partition, a cluster size of 64KB is recommended.
Foundry
Next, expand ‘Advanced storage settings’ and select ‘Disks and volumes.’ A list of all physical drives will appear. Click the arrow next to your hard drive to view the associated partitions (volumes). Select the desired data partition and click the ‘Properties’ button.
Next, click the ‘Format’ button. The crucial dialog box will now open. Here, under ‘Label,’ enter a name for your drive. Ensure that ‘NTFS’ is selected under ‘File system.’ In the ‘Allocation unit size’ drop-down menu, select ‘64KB’ explicitly instead of ‘Standard (4KB).’
Tick the box next to ‘Perform quick format’ and confirm the process by clicking ‘Format.’ Please note: This process will irrevocably delete all data on this partition. You should therefore only carry it out on newly created or empty data partitions.
If you wish to set a larger cluster size for a partition, Windows provides the necessary formatting options in ‘Disk Management.’
Foundry
This adjustment to 64KB is so effective because it reduces fragmentation in large files and minimizes the amount of metadata that needs to be managed in the Master File Table (MFT). Please bear in mind a technical limitation: With the standard cluster size of 4KB, an NTFS partition is limited to a maximum of 16TB.
If you upgrade to even larger drives in future, you must use larger clusters to be able to utilize the full capacity. On modern SSDs, you should also ensure that the partitions are aligned with the internal NAND memory.
Nowadays, Windows handles this correctly and automatically when creating partitions via Disk Management or the Settings app, in order to avoid unnecessary write cycles (write amplification).
NTI Backup Pro 7 offers a lot of backup functionality, including file/folder, image, continuous, and cloud backup; network; and even optical disc support. But I found numerous annoying glitches and the cloud storage is pricey indeed.
Price When Reviewed
This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
NTI Backup Pro 7 is what one might refer to as the whole enchilada. It offers file backup, imaging/drive backup, continuous backup as well online backup to NTI Cloud (powered by Microsoft Azure). It backs up to and from networks, and is one of the rare backup programs that supports optical discs.
I was psyched at the feature list and assumed that in the 10 years since I last visited NTI’s flagship backup program, it would be finely honed and bullet-proof. However, first in 2024, and now in 2026, there are still numerous glitches of various types. In the end everything works, but with this much time on the market, it should be rock-solid in all aspects.
As I mentioned, NTI Backup Now Pro 7 offers file and folder backup, drive and partition image backup, continuous backup, and cloud backup. Continuous backup is file and folder backup where changes are backed up as they occur. Cloud backup is also file and folder backup, but to NTI’s own, extremely pricey online storage.
The plain file/folder, image, and online backups are stored in proprietary container files (single large files with all the data contained inside), while the continuous backup is a browsable plain file backup — i.e., files are copied as you would using Windows Explorer. Older revisions of files are kept in a separate folder.
NTI Backup Now Pro 7’s wizard-like interface handily steps you through the process of creating a backup job.
The Backup Now Pro 7 interface is very straightforward, though unlike the EZ version, there’s no hand-holding when it comes to selecting data to back up. No biggie, but it could be just a tad friendlier.
The just-mentioned NTI EZ Backup Now 7.5 (which is $10 less per license) has a slightly more intuitive workflow, though the interface is not one of the prettiest. It lacks the Pro version’s continuous backup, but is otherwise roughly feature equivalent.
NTI EZ Backup Now 7.5 is a bit friendlier than the Pro version, and didn’t have the imaging issues we had with Pro.
Back to Pro…. There’s granular scheduling (in addition to the continuous, of course) available, as well incremental backups to save space, and automatic maintenance of destination storage by purging older files when necessary. Encryption and password protection are also provided.
An NTI Backup Now Pro 7 feature that I absolutely love is the ability to choose multiple local destinations (a secondary internal drive plus external drive, etc.) for a backup job. It would be nice if you could combine local with network locations and the NTI Cloud, but hey, it’s a start
And yes, the program will back up both to and from network locations. As well as to FTP. And, as mentioned up top, Backup Now Pro 7 even supports optical discs.
How much does NTI Backup Pro 7 cost?
At the time of this writing, NTI Backup Now Pro 7 was on sale for $50 (it was $40 two years ago), down from the normal $60 retail price. The EZ version without the continuous backup was $35, $15 off of full list. The continuous backup-only NTI Shadow program is also $30 on sale.
An NTI Backup Now Pro 7 feature that I absolutely love is the ability to choose multiple local destinations (a secondary internal drive plus external drive, etc.) for a backup job.
NTI Backup Now Pro 7 offers a variety of scheduling features as well as incremental backup.
NTI Cloud (required for cloud backup) is free for one-month of 16GB, $5 a month for 32GB, $10 monthly for 64GB, $20 a month for 128GB, $40 per month for 256GB, $100 a month for 640GB, and $200 a month for 2TB.
Google Drive offers 15GB for free. No matter which way you cut it, the NTI Cloud is extremely expensive. As it’s the only online storage service supported, Backup Now’s online backup is not well suited to the average user.
Note that you can use just about any backup program, with nearly any online storage service, by employing a cloud storage manager.
How well does NTI Backup Pro 7 perform?
The interface scaling issues I experienced during my last look two years ago were gone on one test bed, but I still had to override High DPI settings on another to get Backup Now Pro to render properly. It’s still very slow to enumerate the storage tree and the program in general is less than sprightly — aka, slow. Given that our test bed is quite fast, there’s no excuse
Seemingly, it doesn’t query the file system pre-emptively as is common practice. While all these idiosyncrasies may seem picayune, they add up, and do nothing to reassure me that the actual backup functionality will be bullet proof. As it turned out….
While file/folder and continuous backups to local media went off without unusual glitches, imaging proved an issue — as it turns out, because we remote control the test beds using Microsoft Remote Desktop. Backup Now Pro 7 didn’t like this, cancelling every image job before it was five seconds old.
After over a week of back and forth, and hours of troubleshooting, NTI explained this as a security “feature.” However, the logic behind it escapes me, and it’s hard to consider it a feature when no other program exhibits the same behavior. R-Drive Image, Acronis Cyber Security Home Office, Aomei Backupper, and Macrium Reflect Home all backed up without a fuss.
NTI Backup Pro 7 will not work if you’re controlling the PC it’s installed on via Microsoft Remote Desktop.
I checked NTI’s EZ Backup Now 7.5 (see above) to see if it suffered the same ‘feature,” and while it failed initially, on the the second try it imaged a partition correctly. Apparently, a partial implementation of said “feature.”
Another annoyance was that choosing to stop a 7GB cloud backup job at 30 percent didn’t stop the backup. I waited a full 10 minutes, then killed the process to cancel the job. Perhaps I was impatient, or perhaps the stop request wouldn’t have been processed until the current 7GB container file was completed — i.e., at 100 percent.
A smaller online backup of the documents, desktop, and downloads folders proceeded without incident, as I’m sure the larger one would have too, if I hadn’t needed to cancel.
On another positive note, creating a recovery disc went without a hitch and booted on both test beds. The image that I was eventually able to create was restored successful as well.
Should you buy NTI Backup Pro 7?
In the end, NTI Backup Pro 7 worked as advertised, but the unfixed annoyances I encountered and the super-high cost of the cloud storage leave me less than enthusiastic. You can give it a spin and see if it’s right for you, but EZ Backup Now 7.5 is likely a better fit for most users
Note that NTI hinted at big changes for the next version, including porting to a better development platform. Here’s hoping.
How I test software
All software is installed on an AMD Ryzen 3700X system utilizing an MSI MEG X570 motherboard with 64GB of Kingston DDR4 memory, and several PCIe 4 NVMe SSDs. The operating system is Windows 11 21H2, to which only security updates are applied to maintain a level playing field over time. The test bed is largely kept off the Internet unless testing the software demands it. All pertinent features are tested and the program rated for stability, suitability to task, ease of use, and feature set.
Should issues arise, all possibly conflicting applications are uninstalled, and if that doesn’t fix the problem, Windows is reinstalled. And as off this writing, controlling the test bed remotely will be checked.
Whether you’re buying a laptop or building your own PC, you’re going to want an SSD as the main storage drive — and you’re also going to want to make sure it’s the right size for your needs.
Sure, you might be able to crack open that laptop and swap out the main drive for a bigger one, or even install a second drive alongside it for additional storage. And yes, you can definitely do that with a desktop PC.
But if you have zero affinity for computer tinkering, then it’s just way more convenient to buy the right amount of storage from the get-go. Working on a computer with a too-small-for-your-needs SSD can be miserable, but you also don’t want to overspend on unused capacity — especially in these shortage-plagued times, when SSDs are going for more than double their previous asking prices.
Here’s everything you need to know about how much SSD storage space you should have in 2026, as well as how big you can reasonably go without wasting your hard-earned money.
Yet while you might be able to cram Windows 11 onto such a small drive, it won’t be comfortable. You won’t have much — if any — room to install third-party applications, download files, or manage PC games.
That said, a computer with a 64GB SSD can technically run Windows 11 as long as you’re willing to forego lots of applications and store all of your files on the cloud, on an SD card, on a USB drive, or a separate SSD. If you do that, it might be usable. But I don’t recommend it.
128GB is the true bare minimum
In 2026, 64GB of SSD storage simply isn’t realistic for most users. To me, a 128GB SSD is the actual bare minimum.
If you aren’t doing a lot of demanding stuff — meaning as long as you stick to lightweight applications, avoid downloading huge files, and don’t store everything on your primary drive — then you could get away with an SSD that has a 128GB capacity.
But 128GB really isn’t a lot these days, especially if you’re a gamer. Plenty of modern PC games take up between 20GB to 30GB each, and then you have games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and God of War Ragnarök that are each larger than 150GB and wouldn’t even fit on an SSD of that size.
On top of that, SSDs that are too full and near capacity begin to slow down and lose performance, so you can’t truly utilize the full 128GB of space on your drive without consequences. Do you really want to be micromanaging your files and storage space all the time?
A 256GB SSD is a much more reasonable size and adequate for most typical users. With 256GB of space, you can install some large applications, store many gigabytes of data, and still have room to spare. You don’t have to think about your storage limit as often.
256GB also happens to be the minimum SSD size requirement for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs. More and more PCs will likely settle on this as a “new minimum” as Copilot+ PCs become more mainstream. That makes this a good minimum capacity to hit if you care about future proofing — though most people would be better off snagging a 512GB laptop if possible. This is enough to get by, but you may have to make rough decisions in a few years.
512GB (or more) for avid gamers, downloaders, and power users
When you move beyond 256GB, it really starts to become about your specific needs. For basic web browsing, office work, and streaming media, 256GB is more than enough — but if you plan on storing lots of big video files or installing PC games, you’ll want more.
For PC gaming, the more storage the better. As mentioned before, PC games are massive and only getting bigger, so you’ll likely want at least 1TB of SSD capacity if you’re a heavy gamer who digs AAA titles. But it really depends on the types of games you play. You could get by with just 512GB if your Steam library is mostly small, niche, indie games.
Likewise, for content creation and media editing, files are usually quite large. Depending on bitrate, an hour of 4K video footage could reach 50GB or even double that. (Then again, if you create and edit content, you probably already have some idea of how much space you need for the type of files you work with.)
If you’re a data hoarder, the situation is a little different. You’d likely be better off with a moderately sized SSD and storing your big data files on external drives connected over Thunderbolt. In fact, for long-term storage that’s infrequently accessed, HDDs still prevail over SSDs. (Unfortunately, hard drive prices have also skyrocketed in 2026.)
When in doubt, shoot to have at least 256GB of SSD storage if possible. While you could get by with 128GB in a pinch, it’ll be a lot less comfortable. And don’t even consider dropping down to 64GB — it may be technically possible, but it won’t be fun at all.
If you plan on playing modern PC games, you’ll want at least 512GB of storage, but aim for 1TB or more if your budget allows. If you work with large files, you should have a good idea of what you need. It isn’t unusual for power users to want 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, or more.
How much does SSD storage cost?
The only real downside to a bigger SSD storage size is the cost. Bigger capacities can be cheaper per gigabyte, but they still cost more overall and you don’t want to overspend for unused space.
Here’s a rough ballpark of prices for internal SSDs these days, though premium models can charge premium prices:
256GB: $30 to $65
512GB: $60 to $110
1TB: $130 to $250
2TB: $250 to $400+
If you’re buying a laptop or a pre-built desktop PC, upgraded configurations with larger SSDs may be more expensive than opting for a cheaper configuration with a smaller drive and upgrading the drive yourself. If you can buy the drive on sale, even better.
If you buy an external SSD or a USB stick today that’s being offered at a bargain price with astronomical storage capacities, you should be rather skeptical. The reason: The market is currently being flooded with sophisticated counterfeit storage devices.
Manipulated controller firmware can trick the operating system into believing the device has more capacity than physically exists. Here’s an example: Imagine you’ve bought a supposed 4TB SSD on a well-known online platform and your Windows Explorer also displays this capacity.
In reality, however, the drive contains only a comparatively tiny 64GB chip. The insidious thing about this manipulation is that the controller has been programmed to appear to acknowledge write operations successfully, even when the physical storage has long since been exhausted.
External storage devices with huge capacities at bargain prices sound too good to be true – and in many cases, they are. It’s better to rely on products from brand-name manufacturers.
Samsung
As soon as the actual capacity is exceeded, the drive either starts overwriting the oldest data at the beginning of the storage or simply dumps new data packets into a digital black hole, while the file system continues to report an intact structure.
The rude awakening usually only sets in weeks later, when you try to open your supposedly backed-up holiday photos or documents. Instead of the content, you’ll only get error messages or find corrupted file fragments. We must make this absolutely clear: The operating system is not a reliable indicator of a drive’s integrity.
It merely retrieves the information provided by the controller. And in this case, the controller has been tampered with. To expose these deceptions, you need tools that scrutinize every single bit. You should therefore check every new drive immediately upon receipt using the Validrive tool: Launch the program with administrator rights and select ‘Check USB Drive.’
Thanks to the Validrive program, you can quickly determine whether the storage device actually has the specified storage capacity.
Foundry
Now insert the storage device and allow the program to recognize it. Click on ‘Validate THIS drive’ to start the check. The tool carries out a quick, targeted check by writing to random sectors across the entire declared range and reading them back immediately.
As Validrive measures and analyzes access times during this process, it is able to determine very quickly whether there is actually a physical cell behind a logical address, or whether the controller is simply suppressing an error message.
Phoronix reports on a presentation this week by Meta engineer Gregory Price at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague:
With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM ("CRAM") for Linux.
This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM... For end-users that may already be relying on the likes of Zswap or ZRAM, CRAM is offering near-native DRAM speeds. Read-only data is shown to be as fast as the raw DRAM performance. And for memory writes, CRAM is much faster than ZRAM or Zswap or plain swap.
"Most of the individual pieces needed to support CRAM are already mainline," the article points out.
Tom's Hardware writes that "It uses a private NUMA node (essentially, a ghost CPU) instead of pretending to be a block device, and this lets Linux continue using all of its memory semantics, including migration and ballooning, to manage CRAM."
Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression...
Even when you enable writes, CRAM is still much faster than ZRAM; 5.4x in the worst tested case of 20% writes. That's a huge drop from the 452x read-only case, but keep your context; a 5.4x speedup is still titanic. The massive performance cliff when writes are involved comes down to the need to page fault and migrate folios back to the original NUMA domain, as you can't write directly to compressed data; you'd corrupt everything...
While the obvious target of the work here (given its origin at Meta Platforms) is big Linux servers, ZRAM and Zswap are used all over the Linux ecosystem, even on machines as constrained as the Steam Deck. Many distributions enable one or the other by default. CRAM seems like it could offer a considerable speed-up for some of these machines, so hopefully it finds its way into the kernel once the remaining implementation questions are answered.
TL;DR: Get 1TB of private cloud storage with a Koofr lifetime subscription on sale for $129.99 through October 11 with code KOOFR.
Most cloud storage platforms charge you a monthly fee that seems cheap until you start adding it up year over year over year. If you want a cheaper alternative, Koofr has a 1TB encrypted cloud storage lifetime subscription on sale for $129.99 (reg. $810). This sale ends soon.
A full terabyte is enough room to account for years of photos, dozens of videos, a whole library of documents, and so much more. All your files are available from your browser, desktop, iOS, Android, or WebDAV. Koofr doesn’t cap how many devices you connect, either.
If your files are already scattered, Koofr can link your existing Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon, and OneDrive accounts. Instead of opening four separate apps, you can access everything from one place. A built-in Duplicate Finder clears out repeat copies that waste space, and advanced renaming tools help keep big folders organized.
Koofr doesn’t track what you do, and your files stay encrypted both in storage and during transfer.
To redeem, you’ll need a free Koofr account. Then just apply the code from your purchase here within 15 days of making your purchase.
Stop renting your cloud storage month after month.
The FBI and the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) have issued a joint cybersecurity advisory warning organizations about FortiBleed, an active global credential-compromise campaign targeting internet-facing Fortinet FortiGate firewalls and SSL VPN gateways. The advisory, published on October 6, 2026, cites SOCRadar data verifying more than 86,644 compromised devices across 194 countries.
According to the advisory, the campaign exploits reused or leaked credentials and legacy SHA-256 password storage, allowing threat actors to harvest and crack authentication data at scale. Attackers continue to scan exposed Fortinet firewalls using previously obtained credentials, and some affected organizations have been locked out of their own systems.
How the FortiBleed Attack Chain Works
The operation's internal workflow came to light after the threat actors unintentionally exposed their own backend server. The open directory revealed a mature, multi-stage campaign run as an initial access broker operation.
Attackers first scanned the internet for exposed FortiGate SSL VPN portals using automated scripts. They then gathered credentials through credential stuffing and password spraying, drawing on prior Fortinet leak dumps and infostealer logs.
Password hashes taken from compromised devices were exfiltrated and fed into a GPU-accelerated cracking cluster running on rented infrastructure, where Hashcat and Hashtopolis ran distributed jobs to convert stolen data into plaintext credentials.
Cracked credentials were then validated, with scripts filtering out honeypots, mapping organizations and ranking high-value targets by revenue and network structure. Attackers created new administrative accounts on firewalls to maintain persistence, then moved into victim networks to enumerate Active Directory and identify privileged accounts. The final stage involved selling access, including working VPN configurations and target lists, to downstream threat actors.
FortiBleed Lockouts and Ransomware Links
The advisory warns that victims may lose access to their Fortinet devices if attackers delete original accounts or change their passwords. In certain cases, threat actors removed existing accounts to block organizations from their devices while attempting lateral movement. Recovery may require steps beyond standard patching and password resets.
Reporting also indicates that initial access brokers using the FortiBleed attack chain have supplied access to ransomware affiliates, currently including INC/Lynx ransomware and Payload ransomware.
FortiBleed Indicators of Compromise
The agencies released indicators of compromise (IOCs) to help defenders review their environments. IP address 45.154.12.132 was observed as a command and control server, while 154.202.59.169 and 103.27.186.156 served as proxy nodes and 45.155.250.158 functioned as a beacon relay. The address 85.11.187.8 was linked to the Hashtopolis tool. The advisory also lists 13 IP addresses observed between June 18 and July 23, 2026, conducting brute force attacks or authenticating with compromised accounts.
Account names found on victim systems include adminin, fortiAdmin, forticloud-sync, fgtsecure, adminsslvpn, itadmin and roadmin. The agencies note that IP addresses may be reassigned over time and advise organizations to vet IOCs before acting on them.
Recommended Mitigations Against FortiBleed
The FBI and USSS recommend that organizations:
Restrict external management through trusted hosts, a local-in policy, or by removing internet administration entirely.
Terminate all active admin and VPN sessions and reset all Fortinet VPN and administrative passwords.
Review firewall and VPN configurations for unrecognized accounts and unauthorized changes.
Check firewall, VPN, authentication and domain controller logs for unusual access.
Use PBKDF2 to store administrator credentials and remove weaker legacy hashes, following Fortinet guidance for FortiOS v7.2.11 and later.
Review all REST API keys, remove unknown ones and refresh legitimate keys.
Organizations that detect a compromise are urged to isolate affected hosts, scope the intrusion and report incidents to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a local FBI field office or a local USSS field office.
I’ve been hoping for SSD prices to drop at least a little during holiday sales—and thankfully, Amazon delivered by slashing the price of the Samsung T9, one of our favorite portable SSDs, down to just $335 for the 2TB model. That’s an all-time low since February, when the prices of SSDs began skyrocketing. Normally, this fast, rugged portable SSD has gone for around $450 on the street, with discounts both small and rare.
We’re big fans of the Samsung T9, having given it an almost-perfect 4.5-star rating in our review. It offers top-notch performance, with transfer speeds that zip along at up to 2,000 MB/s, a 5-year warranty, and even a textured surface for better grip while out and about. If you need to copy big files across devices while on the go, this is the drive for you.
As crazy as it sounds, Amazon’s 25 percent discount on this 2TB T9 is one of the best we’ve seen in months… even though the prices aren’t quite the same as last year. (You can place full blame for that on AI data centers.) If you’ve been holding out for a good deal on a speedy, reliable portable SSD, this is your chance. Don’t wait on it!
If you’re looking for a more affordable alternative to USB SSDs, the One Touch Portable provides lots of capacity for a lot less money in a still relatively portable profile. It’s also the fastest of its ilk that I’ve tested.
Price When Reviewed
This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Seagate has expanded its One Touch line to include 2.5-inch hard drive models such as the One Touch Portable reviewed here. In short, there’s nothing revolutionary about the One Touch Portable, but it’s the fastest such beastie I’ve tested. It’s simply a very capable, attractive, and portable USB hard drive that will set you back a lot less per TB than a similar capacity USB SSD. A lot less.
What are the One Touch Portable’s features?
The One Touch Portable carries forth the sculpted, wavy styling of its 3.5-inch sibling and offers the same Type-C connectivity. It’s available in gray, ivory, and dark blue, at 2TB or 4TB capacities.
The drive measures approximately 4.65-inches long, by 3.15-inches wide, and 0.5-inches thick. Weight is a mere 4.6 ounces. Yup, portable. A Type-C to Type-C cable is included with the drive.
The Type-C port on the end of the One Touch Portable, flanked by the power/activity light.
Seagate was specific about the flavor of USB involved, but it really doesn’t make any difference whether it’s 5Gbps or 10Gbps as both offer far more bandwidth than any hard drive can use.
The company’s Toolkit software is included and provides diagnostic and backup capabilities.
The company’s Toolkit software is included which provides diagnostic and backup capabilities.
Seagate warranties the drive for two years with data recovery (where available?) for the same period. Why not three or five years? It is a hard drive with spinning platters and a mechanical read/write head moving about, after all. It’s also portable and likely to encounter at least moderately rougher handling than a desktop hard drive.
How much is the One Touch Portable?
The One Touch Portable is $158 in its 2TB capacity, and $208 for 4TB. That’s about half the current SSD price per terabyte, though quite a bit more than 2.5-inch drives were going for just a couple of years ago. The price per terabyte is also greater than 3.5-inch hard drives such as Seagate’s Expansion Desktop, One Touch USB, and X Vault, but not ridiculously so.
Note that after a slight dip in August 2026, SSD prices again soared in September. This surprised me just a tad, but if you need capacity, hard drives are by far the more affordable option at the moment and likely to remain so for the immediate future.
How fast is the One Touch Portable?
For a 2.5-inch USB hard drive, the One Touch Portable is actually quite fast — a couple MBps faster than the other 2.5-inch drives I’ve tested. It’s not for moving vast amounts of data in a hurry, but it’s more than adequate for unattended backup, streaming media, and other tasks.
Note that streaming even high-resolution movies doesn’t require nearly as much bandwidth as some people might think. Less than 50MBps generally speaking.
As for the 2.5-inch competition, the One Touch Portable easily motored past the older WD My Passport drives in all our tests, including CrystalDiskMark 8 (shown below). The 4K tests are not included because the performance in those is generally only a MB or two per second and the chart looks a bit ridiculous.
If you need capacity, hard drives are by far the more affordable option at the moment and likely to remain so for the immediate future.
The One Touch Portable easily motored past the older WD My Passport drives in all our tests, including CrystalDiskMark 8. Longer bars are better.
The One Touch Portable also banged on the competition in our 48GB transfers.
The One Touch Portable also banged on the competition in our 48GB transfers. Shorter bars are better.
Shaving nearly 13 minutes off the 2.5-inch competition is no mean feat for the One Touch Portable. Here again, however, you can see the speed advantage of a 3.5-inch hard drive, which lopped off another 23 minutes.
Shaving nearly 13 minutes off the 2.5-inch competition is no mean feat for the One Touch Portable. Here again, however, you can see the speed advantage of a 3.5-inch hard drive which lopped off another 23 minutes. Shorter bars are better.
For a 2.5-inch USB hard drive, the One Touch Portable hauls the mail. That said, it’s still about the slowest type of external storage you can buy these days. Buy 2.5-inch for capacity and portability.
Should you buy the One Touch Portable?
If you need both capacity and portability, this buy makes sense. It’s the best 2.5-inch hard drive I’ve tested. You can get more capacity and speed with a 3.5-inch hard drive, but those are significantly less convenient in the haul-around department. Given the SSD’s rising price per TB, we’re currently favoring hard drives for a lot of storage missions.
Further, the 4TB unit is our choice between the two capacities thanks to a $52 versus $79 price per terabyte. Thank me later.
Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (128GB of memory total).
Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are integrated into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used.Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs involved in testing are mounted in a Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card.
We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 synthetic benchmarks (to keep article length down, we only report one) to find the storage device’s potential performance, then a series of 48GB and 450GB transfers tests using Windows Explorer drag and drop to show what users will see during routine copy operations, as well as the far faster FastCopy run as administrator to show what’s possible.
A 20GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used as the second drive in our transfer tests. Formerly the 48GB tests were done with a RAM disk serving that purpose.
Each test is performed on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This issue has abated somewhat with the current crop of SSDs utilizing more mature controllers and far faster, late-generation NAND.
Note that our testing MO evolves and these results may not match those from previous articles. Only comparisons inside the article are 100% valid as those results are gathered using the current hardware and MO.
It’s been a brutally bad year for anyone who needs more storage or RAM, but Amazon’s Prime Day is ready to rescue you from misery. Today and tomorrow, you can grab the fantastic 1TB Samsung 9100 Pro SSD for $207 – assuming you’re a Prime subscriber of course. (Here’s how to get Amazon Prime for free if needed.)
I won’t try and oversell that by saying it’s “only” $207 when storage prices have skyrocketed over the past year (thanks, AI). But in this current hellscape, you could do a lot worse. That $207 price is a whopping 39 percent off the drive’s stated $340 MSRP, as well as a solid $40 discount below the $250 price the drive has sat at (or above) since April.
And the Samsung 9100 Pro is flat-out great. Our review hailed it as “the return of the king” upon launch a year ago, praising its chart-topping performance and abundant features. “In the right system with the right software, the 9100 Pro will run rings around the competition,” our veteran SSD tester reported.
If you’re going to spend an arm and a leg for an SSD, might as well spend that money on one you’ll have zero regrets about – especially when you can get it on a rare, substantial discount. Be sure to snag the 1TB Samsung 9100 Pro for $207 before Prime Day turns into a pumpkin at midnight Pacific time, and also make sure you check out PCWorld’s big Amazon Prime Day tech deals roundup for even more juicy sales.
Amazon’s October Prime Day (hopefully) kicks off the holiday sales season, and it’s an ideal opportunity for you to update your home office. From new displays to an update to the humble mouse, these are some of the deals that we’re keeping an eye as the deal days progress.
Keep in mind that Amazon’s October Prime Day deals last just today and tomorrow, October 6 through October 7. However, rival Walmart is running its own sales all week, so that may keep deals in place longer than Amazon planned. If so, expect to see this article updated as warranted.
Remember, some or all of these deals might require an Amazon Prime membership to sign up for. Don’t despair — there are ways to get Amazon Prime for free.
Believe it or not, there are two centerpieces for your desk, your display and the laptop docking station. We have deals on both.
Plugable Thunderbolt 4 Dock: $149.96 ($50 off at Amazon)
Amazon
Who is this for? Plugable’s dock is slim, compact, and to the point: It gives you what you want, and not much more. I really like the two dedicated HDMI display ports and the additional Thunderbolt4 upstream port, which can be used for connecting a monitor or for additional expansion.
Why is this deal good? I’ve seen mainstream Thunderbolt 4 docks at $225 to $250, and it’s wonderful to see a focused Thunderbolt 4 dock arrive at a price well under that.
Get the Plugable Thunderbolt 4 Dock for $149.96 at Amazon
I really want to buy a new OLED display for my desk, but the problem is that OLED displays with stunning blacks and high contrast aren’t quite there in the format I’d like: large, 4K, and high refresh rate. So you have a choice: drop down to a slightly lower-res 1440p display, or choose a more traditional IPS panel…which to be honest, works just fine.
High-refresh rate OLEDs are generally considered “gaming” monitors, even if you use them for normal work.
Acer Predator 26.5-inch 1440p OLED (X27U): $314.99 at Amazon
Who is this for? Acer’s Predator 1440p OLED is designed for gamers, but there’s little difference between someone who is using this for productivity or for playing games after hours. Since it offers 99 percent DCI-P3 coverage, you can certainly use it for photo editing as well as shooting aliens.
Why is this deal good? There’s no discount on this display, but it’s at the lowest price in a year, so it’s worth it.
Get the Acer Predator 26.5-inch 1440p OLED (X27U) for $314.99 at Amazon
if you’re looking for something a little more productivity focused, however, there’s an opportunity to buy a lovely large 32-inch 4K IPS display, too.
Asus 32-inch 4K Display (VP327Q), $179.00 ($70 off at Amazon)
Amazon /Asus
Who is this for? The selling point here is size: A 32-inch display allows you to see more of what you’re working on, especially for a single display. Is it too large? I don’t think so, especially with the number of pixels it’s pushing. DisplayPort and HDMI connections can accommodate most display outputs. There are built-in blue-light filters, too.
Why is this deal good? Another display that’s at its lowest price in a year. A month ago, this would have cost about $239 or so.
Get the Asus 32-inch 4K Display (VP327Q) for $179.00 ($70 off) at Amazon
Don’t forget that laptop! We think that the Asus Vivobook Go is one of the best deals we’ve seen.
Asus Vivobook Go 15, $479.99 ($120 off at Amazon)
Asus
Who is this for? My colleague Ashley Biancuzzo says that the Vivobook Go is for anyone who just needs a barebones machine. Just something reliable for browsing or streaming. Whatever it is you do when you’re busy killing time. Check out her roundup of the best Prime Day laptop deals for more.
Why is this a good deal? The Vivobook Go sits in that increasingly important “just enough laptop” category. It’s not trying to be crazy powerful. It’s trying to be consistent.
Get the Asus Vivobook Go 15 for $479.99 ($120 off at Amazon)
What would a home office be without a webcam? I reviewed the Obsbot Meet 2 4K webcam earlier this year, and I loved it. Amazon has it on a substantial sale for October Prime Day.
Obsbot Meet 2 4K webcam: $99.00 ($30 off at Amazon)
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Who is this for? The fact is that 4K webcams are more common than ever, so testing them really helps determine which webcams work best in low light, which are more color-accurate, et cetera. My review of the Obsbot Meet 2 really helped convince me that this is a webcam that you want to buy. (Sample pictures included, of course.)
Why is this deal good? You will find lower prices on other webcams at Amazon. However, nearly a quarter off on a solid 4K webcam is worth it, I think.
Get the Obsbot Meet 2 4K webcam for $99.00 ($30 off at Amazon)
Unfortunately, Amazon is not selling the excellent Logitech MX Master 4 mouse as part of its Amazon October Prime Day sales. However, the older MX Master 3S mouse is being offered at a decent discount, which is an ideal opportunity to upgrade if you haven’t done it already.
Logitech MX Master 3S (Bluetooth) Wireless Mouse: $79.99 ($20 off at Amazon)
Who is this for? The Logitech MX Master 3S boasts an incredibly accurate 8,000 dpi sensor and the series’ noted thumbwheel and thumb rest. If you set the MX Master 4 aside, it’s probably the ultimate productivity mouse. The MX Master 4, unfortunately, is not on sale.
OK, storage prices stink these days, but hang on…what’s this?
Lexar 2TB ES5 External SSD: $284.49 ($95 off at Amazon)
Who is this for? This drive works as an external SSD for PCs and phones with a USB-C port, and also includes MagSafe compatibility for iPhones, which is something you rarely see. It’s a nice, quick way to transfer files quickly from your phone to your PC, and the USB-C cord works as a strap, too.
Why is this deal good? We all know that storage prices have skyrocketed, but the price of this external SSD isn’t bad: It’s the lowest price since February, when the prices started spiking. Amazon says that this drive was about at $180 or so a year ago, but that’s just the way it goes.
Get the Lexar 2TB ES5 External SSD for $284.49 ($95 off) at Amazon
Would you look at that! We finally have a proper deal on PC storage. Right now, Amazon is selling the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD for just $209.99. That isn’t just a big $90 drop from its original $299.99—that’s a brand-new all-time low price for this drive. Given the state of the PC hardware market and skyrocketing SSD prices, this October Prime Day deal is one of the biggest surprises… so get it while you still can.
This is SanDisk’s newest SSD model, released earlier this year, and you’re paying for three big benefits. First, its 1TB capacity. That’s a lot of storage space, large enough to hold dozens of 4K movies. Having that much space on hand is great for convenience and peace of mind, especially if you have data-hoarding tendencies—and that’s all the more true if you have a small laptop with a tiny drive filled up by your operating system.
But second, what you’re really paying for is the performance. This SanDisk Extreme is rated for up to 2,000 MB/s, which is blazing fast for a portable SSD. Compare that to SanDisk’s cheaper 1TB SSD at $129.99 for 600 MB/s or Samsung’s T7 1TB SSD at $229.90 for 1,050 MB/s. For similar speeds, you’re looking at Amazon Basics 1TB SSD for $239.90 or Samsung T9 1TB SSD for $254.66—clearly, this SanDisk Extreme is the best value.
Just note that your laptop (or whatever device) will need to support USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 to reach these speeds. Otherwise, it’ll cap out at the top speeds supported by the port you plug into.
Third, you’re paying for its ruggedness. It carries an IP65 rating, meaning it’s sealed against dust, splashes, and spills; it also survive bumps and drops from up to 3 meters high; and it even has 256-bit AES encryption with password protection to keep all your files fully secure.
The SanDisk Extreme 1TB is the best portable SSD deal for October Prime Day, so take advantage if you need a high-performance drive. The one catch is that this is a Prime-exclusive deal—if you don’t have Prime, learn how you can get Amazon Prime for free. And if you still have more shopping left in you, check out the best tech deals for October Prime Day.
A new open-source command-line tool called RemoveMacAI lets macOS 27 users disable Apple Intelligence and reclaim around 12GB or more of storage. MacRumors reports: In macOS 27, Apple removed the toggle to disable Apple Intelligence wholesale, and simply disabling individual features doesn't remove the models from your Mac's drive. As explained by the developer, RemoveMacAI gets around this by using a configuration profile to switch off Apple's own asset management service and remove the models.
It then configures the system so attempts to download the removed models are redirected to a closed local port, preventing them from immediately coming back. And it does all this without disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP) or manually deleting files from protected system locations, unlike some older tools have. The tool can free up roughly 12GB of space depending on which models are present on your Mac. That said, some users are reporting cases of Apple Intelligence models having taken up a lot more space, which they've now reclaimed.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Yes, the Orico TB5 is a Thunderbolt 5 hub/dock. But as it also offers lightning fast storage performance, we thought users might be interested in just how fast said storage is. Long story short — very.
Of course, I tested it as a dock as well, but only to confirm functionality. Okay, I lie. I kicked the dock features pretty thoroughly and cover them below, but it’s not my beat so I’ll just say it’s easily one of my favorites in that regard. Right up there with the OWC StudioStack.
The TB5 is compact, measuring approximately 6.7-inches wide, by 3.5-inches deep, by 1.35-inches tall. The hub/dock/NVMe enclosure controlled by Intel’s JHL9480 weighs around 15 ounces including the NVMe SSD.
I must say, I was impressed with the location and access to the TB5’s single PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe port. It’s on the bottom of the unit (see the image below), walled off by a magnetically secured access plate. You can pry the plate off with a finger, yet it’s not going anywhere unless you want it to.
I was slightly perplexed to see that the SSD retaining screw wasn’t already in place — but sure enough, there was one in a mini-baggie in the box. Kind of a waste of plastic in my book, but what the heck.
As the TB5 is primarily a hub/dock, it makes sense to list all the ports that it provides. On the back are the power jack, full-sized HDMI and DP ports, the upstream (PC) Thunderbolt 5 port, a single downstream Thunderbolt 5 port, a 2.5GbE (Ethernet) port, and a headphone jack.
The ports on the back of the TB5 are nicely spaced. Those on the front — not so much. See the discussion on dock performance below.
The front is home to SD and TF 4.0 card slots, four 10Gbps USB ports (three Type-A, one Type-C), a second downstream Thunderbolt 5 port, and the power button. Personally, I find the front/back allotment of the ports fits my needs perfectly, with a major caveat that I’ll discuss in a bit. It’s a matter of taste, but I like the USB on the front.
The TB5, as all Thunderbolt 5 docks do, ships with a very beefy power supply. In this case a 20 volt, 9 amp brick that weighs around 1 pound , 7 ounces. Like I said, beefy.
Orico advertises 120Gbps as the TB5’s maximum speed, as do many Thunderbolt 5 docks. However, with Thunderbolt 5 standard, 120Gbps is only for uni-directional downstream video to allow more high-resolution displays and/or greater resolutions. Storage, being bi-directional is capped at 80Gbps, or around 6GBps sequential throughput.
How much is the Orico TB5?
At $330 the TB5 is hardly an impulse buy. Depending on your impulses, of course. That said, keep in mind that Thunderbolt 5 storage enclosures sans accouterments already run around the $150 mark.
The ports assigned to the rear of the TB5 make sense being there and are spaced farther apart than those on the front. See below.
If you need to kill two issues with one device — the need for more easily accessible ports and fast external storage — then a hybrid dock with storage is well worth considering. It certainly cuts down on the clutter — until you start cabling other devices, that is.
You’ll need to provide your own NVMe SSD for the TB5, which isn’t going to be cheap these days. In case you go bargain hunting in this NAND/DRAM-challenged market, even a PCIe 4.0 SSD is fast enough to saturate the 80Gbps bus.
A PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD will still get you two-thirds of the way there with around 4GBps sequential transfers. PCIe 5.0 is overkill and a needless expense. Just sayin’
How is the TB5 as a hub/dock?
As I mentioned, I kicked all the ports on the TB5 thoroughly. All ports worked as advertised and to speed. I had only a 4K display with which to check the HDMI and DP ports, but they were fine at that resolution at 60Hz. 80Gbps storage performance via the two downstream Thunderbolt 5 ports was mostly on par with the internal storage discussed in the next section.
I do have two complaints: First, the unit doesn’t power on with your system — you have to press the power button. I’d prefer that the TB5 power on, then allow the option of turning it off with said power button. A piddling gripe, that.
More annoyingly, the front USB ports are spaced too close together if you want to use a thumb drive in each. The three Type-A’s are approximately 0.75-inches from center to center and the rightmost is only 0.65-inches from the center of the 10Gbps Type-C.
Although this looks fine, the USB ports are so close together that you can’t fit as many thumb drives as you could if they were oriented vertically or slightly further apart.
Most thumb drives are a tad wider than 0.75-inches. I could not fit three abreast in the Type-A ports, or use one in the rightmost Type-A port and the Type-C port at the same time. I could squish two thumb drives into adjacent Type-A ports, but only with one at a slight angle. Doable, but hardly optimal.
Obviously, this will not be an issue with devices that attach with cables and their thinner connectors, but if you’re rife with thumb drives, take note. You could, of course, use USB extension cables, but that’s an unsightly kludge if you’re opposed to cable clutter.
In the next iteration, Orico should consider spacing the ports more widely, or orienting them vertically. Perhaps move the power button to the back, where you’re likely using cables anyway?
How fast is the Orico TB5?
The Orico TB5’s storage performance lived up to the company’s 6GBps claims. In fact, it even finished first in a couple of tests and is currently the third-fastest external SSD I’ve ever tested. Note that this was in no small part due to my populating the M.2 slot with a PCIe 5.0 Crucial T705 — an SSD capable of over 14GBps.
Though not the fastest in CrystalDiskMark 8, the TB5 was within shouting distance of the leaders in most tests.
Though not the fastest in CrystalDiskMark 8, the TB5 we within shouting distance of the leaders in most tests. Longer bars are better.
With CrystalDiskMark’s 4K tests, it was right on par overall, as well as the fastest writing with 32 queues. Note that Windows Explorer, even more than a decade out from the advent of NVMe, still does not use queues. Maybe if Microsoft concentrated on making its OS perform better rather than be more intrusive, this might change. Until then, use FastCopy.
CrystalDiskMark’s 4K tests had the TB5 right on par, as well as the fastest writing with 32 queues. Longer bars are better.
The TB5/T710 combo was no slouch in the real world either, turning in a stellar 48GB transfer performance in Windows Explorer.
The TB5/T710 combo was no slouch in the real world either, turning in a stellar 48GB transfer performance in Windows Explorer. Shorter bars are better.
The TB5 came close to the best time writing 450GB, falling a bit short but still within 10 seconds of the number one OWC 1M2 80Gbps (not listed).
The TB5’s internal storage is indeed fast. An 80Gbps SSD (the number one OWC 1M2 80Gbps) attached to the downstream Thunderbolt ports read just as fast, but write performance was a good 2GBps slower. Still 4GBps while placing data in cells ain’t half bad.
Should you buy the Orico TB5?
Just for storage? No. You can get by a whole lot cheaper if that’s all you’re interested in.
However, if you’re looking for a full-blown dock that doubles as very fast Thunderbolt 5 storage, then that’s a yes. It’s basically on par performance-wise with any Thunderbolt 5 storage I’ve tested.
Just mind the narrow USB port spacing on the front of the unit.
How we test
Our storage tests currently utilize Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on a Z790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel integrated graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the operating system.
Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that as any drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, and other factors.
The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive we were shipped as well as the capacity tested. SSD performance can vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to read/write across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC).Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report (systems being roughly equal), by all means — let us know.
Apple says it will tighten macOS Full Disk Access controls as increasingly capable AI agents raise the risks of apps gaining broad access to users' files, messages, mail, and browsing history. TechCrunch reports: Days after a journalist claimed that Meta's Muse app on Mac read their private messages -- a claim that Meta disputed -- Apple announced that it's introducing additional controls around a setting called "Full Disk Access" on macOS. The feature was designed to allow backups to function properly, but AI agents have now increased "the risks associated with this level of access," Apple said. [...] In Muse's case, the AI optionally allows users to enable Full Disk Access. This setting, Apple explains, gives an app permission to access files, mail, messages, and even browsing history.
"Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems... without users' full knowledge and understanding," Apple said in a new blog post aimed at developers. The company says that, going forward, it will introduce new controls aimed at ensuring that users who "genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access" can do so only with "every explicit user action."
"Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy," Apple wrote.
October Prime Day is here! But some discounts are still hard to swallow, given the state of things in the world and the global economy. If you’re like me, your budget is tight—not much room to enjoy Prime Day sales.
That’s why I’ve combed through all the discounts to find the best October Prime Day tech deals for less than $10. Yup, I’m not kidding. This list is for the shopper who’s on an ultra-tight budget and still wants to grab some practical stuff while prices are down below a tenner.
Get Prime for free: Not all October Prime Day deals require a Prime subscription, but the best ones do. If you don’t have an active Prime account, you might be able to get a free one for a limited time. That’ll let you score the biggest discounts, both on this list and across Amazon.
Who is this for? You just want a lightweight pair of on-ear headphones, and you want to pay the absolute minimum without edging into no-name-brand territory. The Sony MDR-ZX110 are comfy, sound good, and they have swivel cups that fold flat for easy packing. The only downside? They’re wired with a 3.5mm jack, so incompatible with some phones (sorry, Apple users!)… unless you grab this 3.5mm-to-USB-C adapter for $6.
If you want a built-in microphone, that version is about twice the price.
Why is this deal good? Look around as much as you want, but you won’t find quality headphones for under $10. Even nonsense Chinese brands don’t go this cheap, and the only way to go cheaper is to opt for earbuds instead. Comfortable with good sound quality from a reputable brand like Sony, all for just $9.99? It might just be the best deal on this whole list.
Who is this for? Few things are as annoying as a slow-charging smartphone when you’re in a rush, but at least the fix is easy. You just need a faster cable. Belkin’s 240W USB-C Cable supports ultra-fast charging that’s even fast enough for power-chugging gaming laptops, and it’s able to restore an iPhone 16 Pro Max from 0% to 50% in under half an hour. The only hiccup is that it’s 3.3-feet long, but that’s a fine trade-off for the speed.
Why is this deal good? At $7.89, it’s essentially matching the lowest ever price it’s been, only off by a few cents. That’s a small price to pay for all that time you’ll be saving—if you don’t mind its short length.
Who is this for? Acer’s 8K/60Hz HDMI Cable is for gamers and movie buffs who want to link up their devices to ultra-high-def screens at a good distance. This one’s 6.6 feet long, and the fact that it supports both 4K/120Hz and 8K/60Hz displays means you’re future-proofing your setup.
Why is this deal good? This $5 drop represents a 42% discount, and that’s a new all-time lowest price for this premium HDMI cable. Not all HDMI cables are created equal—cheap and outdated cords will bottleneck your hardware. This Acer cable, however, boasts a massive 48Gbps bandwidth, making it fully capable of handling 4K video at a buttery-smooth 120Hz or 8K at 60Hz. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s durable enough to snake tightly behind a flush TV wall mount without wearing out.
Who is this for? The Acer Dual-USB SD Card Reader is for anyone who has a microSD or SD card at home. Laptops rarely feature card readers anymore, so if you have a card in your phone, dashcam, security camera, or even a CPAP machine, you’ll need a way to pull data off it and onto your laptop on demand. This Acer accessory is about the same size as a thumb drive and features both USB-C and USB-A ends.
Why is this deal good? At $9.48, it’s only half a buck higher than its lowest ever price and a solid value for an accessory that you’ll always be glad to have on hand when you least expect to need it. You get 5Gbps USB 3.0 speeds for fast file transfers, a true plug-and-play setup with no drivers or software needed, and a solid build that’ll hold up over years.
Who is this for? The Logitech M196 Bluetooth Wireless Mouse is a portable wireless mouse that’s great for everyday work and little else. Don’t need the bells and whistles of a gaming mouse? Or the highfalutin features of a premium productivity mouse? This’ll get you through the day on the cheap. And since it’s a Bluetooth mouse, you don’t even need to use the dongle that would otherwise take up a USB port.
Why is this deal good? Paying under $10 for a Logitech mouse is normally unheard of, even for a model as basic as this one.The fact that it also comes with Bluetooth pairing, an ambidextrous design, and the ability to work on any surface? That makes it worth every dollar. The only downside is that only the Rose Pink option is this cheap. If you prefer black and don’t mind going wired, check out the Logitech B100 mouse for $6.99.
Who is this for? You have a mouse, but do you have proper wrist support? While a flat mouse pad might be better for shooter games, you could be sustaining long-term wrist damage if you ignore ergonomics. This cheap Amazon Basics Ergonomic Mouse Pad has a comfortable gel-filled wrist pad, and it stays in place thanks to its non-slip base.
Why is this deal good? For less than the cost of a Starbucks frappé, you can ensure better wrist health for years to come. It’ll take a little time to get used to, but the payoff will be well worth it.
Who is this for? Even in 2026, there’s no shortage of consumer electronics that run on AAA batteries. If you’re tired of the churn and constantly throwing away cash on replacements, you might as well switch to Amazon Basics Rechargeable AAA Batteries now, and you can start with this nifty 12-pack. Stick them in your remotes, wireless peripherals, LED lamps, smart sensors, VR controllers, and everything else.
Why is this deal good? At $8.96, you’re paying just 75 cents per battery. And these are 800mAh batteries with low self-discharge, offering solid capacity (so you don’t have to recharge them too often) and lots of charge cycles without wearing out (so they’re cost-effective).
Who is this for? You have rechargeable AA and AAA batteries, so now you need a decent charger. This Amazon Basics AA/AAA Battery Charger is a 4-bay model that fits both AA and AAA types, with fast charging performance, protection against overcharging, and LED charging indicators. It’s pretty bare-bones as they go, but so what? It gets the job done.
Why is this deal good? At $8.89, it’s dirt cheap, and it can be this cheap because it doesn’t have all the unnecessary bells and whistles of other models. If all you need is reliable battery charging, it’s a good price.
Who is this for? Anyone who owns a tablet—whether an iPad, a Samsung Galaxy Tab, or even Amazon Fire HD 10—and is tired of holding it all the time. Lisen’s Tablet Stand lets you prop it up, freeing up your hands to cook dinner, work on your knitting project, or just chill in your pockets. With 360-degree rotation and adjustable viewing angle, you can even use it as a stand for your portable monitor used as a second laptop screen.
Why is this deal good? Between its versatile adjustability and aluminum construction, this Lisen stand feels more premium than its price would imply. It works with tablets sized 4.7 to 11 inches, and it’s just a downright practical accessory—worth every penny now that it’s just $9.48.
Who is this for? The person who needs extra portable storage and can’t stomach the going prices for SSDs and hard drives. (Thanks, AI data centers!) Flash drives have also gotten super expensive, but this Verbatim 64GB USB Flash Drive remains affordable. Keep in mind it’s a USB 2.0 drive, so expect file transfer speeds to max out at 20 MB/s. But if you want a flash drive for under $10 these days, that’s a sacrifice you’ll have to make.
Why is this deal good? For anyone whose budget is strictly capped at $10, this 64GB option is about as big as you’ll get. If you want a faster drive, you’ll have to spend twice as much—like on this SanDisk 64GB Ultra Flair Flash Drive, which supports USB 3.0 speeds for just $18.88 right now.
PC upgrades cost more than they used to. At least, if you’re looking to get more storage space. AI data center buildouts have obliterated affordable prices for SSDs and hard drives. Even SD cards and flash drives haven’t been immune!
If you’d like to reduce the sting of sky-high costs, Amazon’s October Prime Day offers a temporary reprieve. The main event runs through Wednesday, October 7 at 11:59pm Pacific Time, so just hours remain to grab deals from Amazon–and its rivals, who also want in on the action. Given how harsh SSD prices are right now, a good sale is valuable no matter which major retailer offers it.
Accordingly, you’ll see a larger number of Newegg deals below. But regardless of where you shop, don’t sit on a discount you like. It may not last very long.
Who is this for? You can’t beat the speed of an NVMe SSD, especially a blistering-fast Gen 5 drive that won our hearts last fall. The Samsung 9100 Pro is a great choice for starting or upgrading a PC build, as you’ll ensure snappier performance for years to come.
Why is this deal good? Prices on NVMe SSDs have been stubbornly high, but this sale price of $207 lets you snap up one of the fastest SSDs around for about the same price as a slower Gen 4 drive (and from a major, well-performing brand to boot).
Who is this for? A SATA SSD has always been a great balance between “fast” and “affordable.” Team Group still delivers on this front with its Vulcan Z drives, which upgraders on a budget can easily grab in 512GB or 1TB configurations.
Why is this deal good? SATA SSDs are harder to find, and most have risen in price. Even with single-digit discounts, these Vulcan Z drives don’t cost as much as rivals.
Who is this for? You need a rugged, speedy, and travel friendly storage drive that doesn’t skimp on capacity, nor performance. And you want it from one of the top names among SSD manufacturers.
Why is this deal good? This discount drops the cost of the 2TB Samsung T9 Portable back to what we last saw in February of this year–an absolute eternity ago for SSD pricing. (Yep, the price jumped $100+ since the tail end of last winter. Crazy times.)
These aren’t the only October Prime Day deals being tracked by the PCWorld team. If you’re looking to supercharge your home setup with the juiciest tech sales, hit the links for only the best expert-curated picks we’ve found.
The balance between demand and supply has shifted. Data centers want as much storage as possible, and that’s shrunk the number of drives available to consumers. As a result, prices have shot up dramatically over the past year.
2.
Do brands matter for SSDs and storage?
Yes, but only to a point. Major manufacturers are generally reliable—think Samsung, Crucial, Western Digital (aka WD), SK Hynix, Corsair, Kingston, and even newer players like TeamGroup and Solidigm. Outside of that, you may be playing a bit fast and loose with your data’s longevity.
However, everyone has that one horror story about a hard-disk drive that failed, and why they’ll never use, say, WD or Crucial again. That’s less commonly a manufacturing error, and more so a matter of luck. No drive is guaranteed to meet its life expectancy, which is why you should perform regular backups.
3.
Is an SSD better than a HDD?
SSDs are faster and take less room in a PC than a hard-disk drive (HDD), which gives them a strong edge. If you only have one storage drive in your PC, it should ideally be an SSD so you get faster boot times and quicker access to your files. A HDD as your primary drive will feel much slower.
But HDDs still have their advantages. First, they’re cheaper. The going price of a 2TB HDD is about the same (or less) than a 1TB SSD. You also can get them in higher capacities than SSDs, though the biggest capacities have become expensive. If you need secondary storage and you don’t need it to be fast, HDDs are a fantastic option.
4.
How do I know if an SSD deal is good?
Here’s the guideline we use for picking deals: First, it should be for an SSD that performs well (or in select cases, performs well for its MSRP), and has at least a 10-15 percent discount compared to its normal street price. Some models may be selected with a smaller discount if they rarely go on sale.
5.
Have tariffs affected SSD and storage prices?
Tariffs have caused small increases on computer components, but storage pricing has been most affected by data centers. Demand has grown enough that supply available to consumers have shrunk, driving up prices.
The Naylors’ four-bedroom home in Milton Keynes acts like a mini-power station after retrofitting solar panels, a battery and a heat pump
Clare Naylor paid close attention to how much energy she and her family were using last winter, filling hot-water bottles and bringing out extra blankets to ensure they didn’t go over budget. This year, she won’t have to worry as she is guaranteed not to receive a bill.
Solid state drives, or SSDs, are singularly responsible for vast improvements to PC performance over the last decade or so. Taking the place of mechanical hard drives, SSDs transformed once-ponderous boot times into being virtually instantaneous, programs and games are far more responsive, and the frustratingly long large-file loads are largely a thing of a past.
If you’re not yet using an SSD, you are missing out. If you already have an older SSD, you might consider upgrading it for the even speedier performance offered by cutting-edge PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 designs — if your PC sports those technologies, of course.
That said, a premium drive may not deliver any more real-world performance than a bargain drive. Mainstream software, including Windows Explorer has yet to implement the numerous performance tricks, such as multiple queues, that NVMe SSDs offer.
PROMOTION
EaseUS PDF Editor – Edit, Convert, Compress & Protect PDFs
Integrate PDF maker, PDF editor, PDF converter, and PDF reader in one full pack with all the basics you need. The clean interface simplifies your PDF work to edit, convert, comment, annotate, merge, split, background, page, watermark, sign PDFs, or fill forms. Your PDF workloads are down by batch processing efficiently.
One very large exception: FastCopy — a file copy and sync utility that allows your SSD to realize its full potential. We highly recommend it for transferring large amounts of data. It will save you tons of time, as will, oddly enough, the command-line utility Xcopy, if you want to exercise your inner geek.
Our recommendations cover both internal SSDs (NVMe picks are listed first, SATA picks second) and external SSDs (listed last). See also PCWorld’s guide to the best external drives if you’re looking strictly for a portable storage solution.
Note that due to the current global NAND storage (one of the many “benefits” of AI), SSD prices have skyrocketed, which renders some of the prices mentioned below and in the referenced review articles out of date.
June 13, 2026: Phison E26-based SSDs have proven problematic in 80Gbps enclosures on Thunderbolt 5 Macs. Avoid them for that use.
Why you should trust PCWorld for SSD reviews and buying advice: It’s in our name, PCWorld. Our reviewers have been testing PC hardware for decades. Our storage evaluations are thorough and rigorous, testing the limits of every product — from performance benchmarks to the practicalities of daily use. As PC users ourselves, we know what makes a product stand out. Only the best SSDs make this list.
Which SSD should you buy?
If you need…
What to buy
Why
The best SSD for most PCs
PCIe 4.0 NVMe, 1TB or 2TB
Fast enough for nearly all everyday, gaming, and productivity workloads without the PCIe 5.0 price premium
A gaming SSD
PCIe 4.0 NVMe, ideally 1TB+
Modern games are large, and Gen 4 performance is already more than enough for most gaming PCs
The fastest possible SSD
PCIe 5.0 NVMe
Best for heavy file transfers and demanding workloads, but more expensive and unnecessary for most users
An upgrade for an older PC
2.5-inch SATA SSD
Much faster than a hard drive and widely compatible with older desktops and laptops
A laptop SSD
M.2 NVMe that matches your laptop’s supported size and PCIe generation
Compatibility matters more than buying the fastest drive available
More storage on a budget
2TB mainstream NVMe
2TB is a good balance of capacity and value for games, photos, video, and everyday files
For most people, a 1TB or 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is the sweet spot. PCIe 5.0 drives are faster on paper, but most users won’t notice much difference in normal Windows use or gaming. SATA is mainly worth considering for older PCs that don’t support NVMe.
WD Black SN7100 SSD – Best PCIe 4.0 SSD
Pros
Top-notch HMB performance
Affordable
Sexy name
Cons
Slower random performance than DRAM designs
Price When Reviewed:
500GB: $60 I 1TB: $90 I 2TB: $140
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the WD Black SN7100/Optimus GX 7100?
Users who want the fastest 1TB to 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD that won’t break the bank, will want the WD Black SN7100, which is still available under that name but will be sold as the SanDisk Optimux GX 7100 going forward. (SanDisk was acquired, then recently divested by WD.) We were wowed by the 2TB version’s first-place finish among host memory buffer (HMB/DRAM-less) SSDs in our benchmarks. It also beat out a number of DRAM designs.
WD Black SN7100/SanDisk Optimus GX 7100: Further considerations
The fact that it’s an HMB design, i.e. it uses your system’s memory for primary caching duties as opposed to featuring DRAM onboard, means the SN7100 is very competitively priced. We’re talking close to $50 less than our previous pick, the Solidigm P44 Pro, for both the 1TB and 2TB capacities.
Combine that with an industry-standard five-year warranty / 600TBW rating (terabytes that can be written) per TB, and you’re looking at the best PCIe 4.0 SSD for average users and gamers.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the WD Blue SN5100/SanDisk Optimus 5100?
Granted, given recent AI-induced price inflation, calling any SSD “budget” is relative, but you will currently spend quite a bit less with this DRAM-less (HMB/Host Memory Buffer) design. Once available at 2TB for $150, the drive is now $280. Thanks, OpenAI. Still, the SN5100, now renamed as the SanDisk Optimus 5100, is at least available to purchase, which can’t be said for a lot of the competition.
The WD Blue SN5100 is the successor to our former bargain pick — the WD Blue SN5000. The newer drive exceeds its predecessor in most tests, particularly in sustained/sequential throughput. At the moment, the pricing of the two models is essentially the same, so we say go with the faster of the two.
WD Blue SN5100/SanDisk Optimus 5100: Further considerations
In our testing, the Blue SN5100 ranked third among all the HMB SSDs we’ve tested — and was first by a large margin writing our 450GB file. You lose nothing in sequential performance these days with HMB.
The drive sports a five-year warranty limited by a TBW rating (terabytes that may be written) of 600TBW per 1TB of capacity.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Teamgroup Z540?
Users looking for every last ounce of performance should be looking at this PCIe 5.0 SSD from Teamgroup. In all fairness, the Z540 traded benchmark wins and finished a hair behind our previous top pick the Crucial T705. But the Teamgroup Z540 beats that competitor when it comes to price, making it the new top pick for this category.
Teamgroup Z540: Further considerations
As with any PCIe 5.0 SSD, there are important caveats. For starters, you’re paying a hefty premium over extremely fast, and in some ways faster (real-world sequential performance) Host Memory Buffer NVMe PCIe 4.0 drives.
Only if you use multi-threaded software and your system sports a late-gen Intel CPU (which the Phison PS5026-E26-52 controller inside this drive is optimized for), can you be assured of benchmarking-busting performance.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the PNY CS2150?
Anyone who enjoys more for less will like this drive — serious coin can be saved on a PCIe 5.0 SSD by opting for a Host Memory Buffer (HNB) design such as PNY’s CS2150. Using the host system’s memory as the SSD’s primary cache instead of dedicated DRAM on the drive means significantly lower manufacturing costs.
PNY CS2150: Further considerations
HMB doesn’t stop the CS2150 from competing with more expensive SSDs. Indeed, the 2TB version that we tested placed 9th overall among all types of NVMe SSDs and it ran neck-in-neck with the Corsair MP700 — another HMB SSD whose performance impressed us.
PNY’s CS2150 trumps its Corsair peer by costing from $10 to $40 less than the latter in the 1TB and 2TB versions, respectively. You still get the industry standard standard five-year warranty and 600TBW (terabytes that can be written) guarantee.
If you have the PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot to support it, this SSD is an affordable way to performance future-proof your storage.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M?
The Optimus GX 7100M is a win-win for gaming handheld owners. It’s the correct 2230 form factor that is necessary for handhelds such as the Steam Deck. What’s more, the GX 7100M stomps the 2230 competition with exceptional performance.
Indeed, it’s the fastest 2230 SSD we’ve tested — nay, the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD of any size we’ve tested. That it’s particularly dominant in 4K performance is noteworthy given that the GX 7100M is an HMB (host memory buffer) design, which historically has been relatively weak with 4K.
Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M: Further considerations
Yes, this SSD is pricey. It’s about $20 more than the 1TB version of the Crucial P310 — our previous pick for the Steam Deck — and over $100 more than the 2TB version of the Crucial P310. That’s a steep premium.
But if you want the absolute fastest 2230 SSD for your gaming handheld, the GX 7100M is it. If you can find it for less than MSRP — which seems likely to happen over time — all the better!
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Seagate Game Drive SSD?
Those who want a great-performing SSD that will outlast the useful life of a PS5, should seriously consider the Seagate Game Drive SSD. It’s a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with a superb TBW rating that’s fully endowed with DRAM for primary caching duties. DRAM maximizes small-file performance in Sony’s console system, which doesn’t support the Host Memory Buffer technology (using system memory for primary caching) that many bargain SSDs employ.
Seagate Game Drive SSD: Further considerations
As to outlasting the console, Seagate provides a generous five-year warranty with the drive and spectacularly — a double-the-industry-norm 1,275TBW rating. TBW (terabytes that may be written) is the mitigating factor in SSD warranties, like the miles in an auto warranty. Exceed them and the SSD may become read-only.
The 1TB and 2TB Game Drive SSDs are a bit pricey, but the extra bucks bring you that TBW peace of mind. Note also, that while Seagate claims the Game Drive is optimized for a PS5, it’s no slouch as a regular SSD either. In our performance tests it was the second-fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD with random (small file) operations that we’ve ever tested.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Samsung 870 EVO?
Users who are looking to add some fast storage via an old-school, but still effective 2.5-inch SATA SSD will want Samsung’s spectacular (for SATA) 870 EVO. It’s the fastest SATA SSD we’ve tested, is available with up to 4TB of capacity, and is exceedingly affordable given the speed.
Samsung 870 EVO: Further considerations
While not as fast as NVMe, 550MBps/fast seeking SATA still blows the doors off of hard drives. Still, like all other PC storage, the 870 EVO’s prices have nearly doubled in recent months.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Crucial BX500?
Those looking to add uber-affordable storage via SATA, should consider the exceedingly cost-effective Crucial BX500. You can get its 1TB model for $72, almost $30 less than the equivalent Samsung 870 EVO, while a 2TB version costs just $130.
Crucial BX500: Further considerations
The drive also comes in nearly dirt-cheap 240GB and 480GB capacities. But be wary of smaller capacity QLC NAND SSDs if you regularly write large amounts of data, as they can slow drastically during such operations.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Crucial X9 Pro?
The Crucial X9 Pro is a sure bet for anyone who wants the fastest 10Gbps performance at a still affordable price. A svelte beauty that delivers 1GBps transfer rates, the X9 Pro is sold in 1TB ($90), 2TB ($130), or 4TB ($237) capacities.
Crucial X9 Pro: Further considerations
In our testing, the X9 Pro performed admirably against the 10Gbps competition. Excelling especially in the real-world 48GB transfer tests and the 450GB write test — where it smoked the other 10Gbps drives we’ve tested.
Crucial also sells the 20Gbps X10 Pro, but you’ll pay quite a bit more for the doubled speed, and said speed is also dependent upon a USB 3.2×2 port. We think that the X9 Pro will serve the average user perfectly fine with excellent all-around performance at a significantly cheaper price point.
For many more external SSD recommendations, see our roundup of the best external drives.
All SSD are tested using a combination of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. To mimic a typical user experience, our real-world tests include 48GB transfers of both a single file and many small files, as well as a 450GB transfer.
The performance numbers we refer to apply only to the drive we were shipped, as well as the capacity tested. SSD performance can vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to read/write across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching. Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report (systems being roughly equal), by all means — let us know.
Having started computing by flipping switches, Jon Jacobi has witnessed storage morph from punch cards and tape to solid state. He’s been using and testing HDDs, SATA SSDs, and NVMe SSDs for PCWorld for well over two decades. To paraphrase a well-known commercial, you might say he’s seen a thing or two.
How to choose the best SSD
There are several factors that you should take into consideration when choosing an SSD.
Should I buy an NVMe or SATA SSD?
Only look for SATA if your computer or device doesn’t support the far, far faster NVMe. Note that an M.2 slot in an older computer might be mSATA rather than NVMe. Read your user guide or manual to see if it’s NVMe-capable/NVMe-bootable. It should be both to take full advantage of NVMe.
The other occasion when you might opt for SATA is in lieu or 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch HDDs, either existing, or in NAS boxes which still favor HDD bays for storage. That’s largely because they’re cheaper, and Ethernet limits throughput anyway so NVMe can be overkill.
Note that SATA SSDs are also available in larger capacities such as the $1700 VectoTech 16TB V-MAX, though that’s a rather unique product.
Should I look for a DRAM or HMB SSD?
SSDs using DRAM for primary caching offer faster random (small file) operations, while those that forego the cost of DRAM use a technique called host memory buffer (HMB). HMB does just what it sounds like, employs your computer (the host) memory for primary caching.
After a rough start, HMB has developed marvelous sequential-transfer performance as fast or faster than DRAM designs, though as just stated above, random operations still lag behind those DRAM designs.
If you want the best overall, and especially random performance, then you want a DRAM design. You’ll pay for it though: HMB designs are often half the price.
Which PCIe generation should my SSD use?
An NVMe SSD won’t perform any faster than the PCIe generation of the CPU/motherboard it’s installed in. Because of that, using a PCIe 5.0 SSD on a PCIe 3.0/4.0 system offers almost no benefit.
In truth, as Windows and most Windows software doesn’t support multiple queues — a major factor in NVMe performance — you can save a lot of money without sacrificing much real world speed by sticking with PCIe 4.0, even in 5.0 motherboards.
NVMe performance even on PCIe 3.0 is insanely fast. Basically, don’t overbuy.
How much capacity should I opt for in my SSD?
You want as much capacity as you can afford. SSDs currently ship in capacities from 250GB to 8TB. More capacity also means more NAND for secondary caching, and less chance you’ll see any slowdowns on long writes. We recently ran across the $1700 VectoTech 16TB V-MAX SATA SSD, but know of nothing in the NVMe world that matches it.
What type of warranty should I look for with my SSD?
Most internal SSDs are warrantied for five years, while externals are more likely to be covered for only three years. These numbers don’t vary much, but make sure it’s not less than that. The warranty can be overridden by the next topic: TBW.
What’s a TBW rating?
The TBW rating (terabytes that may be written), is the manufacturer’s estimate/rating of how much data may be written to an SSD before it morphs into a read-only device. This is due to cells, which are voltage traps, wearing out after a certain number of writes. Reads don’t wear on a cell like a write.
Average TBW rating these days is 600TBW (TLC) per 1TB of capacity. QLC SSDs tend to have much lower TBW ratings, generally 250TBW per TB or less. That’s still a lot of writes.
What should I look for in the way of BIOS support?
To get the most out of an NVMe drive, you want to run your operating system off of it, which requires a system that can boot from NVMe. Any modern PC will, but if you’re rocking older, but still viable hardware, read the specs.
FAQ
1.
What is the best NVMe SSD?
If we had to choose any one SSD to fill our system, it would be the WD Black SN7100. This PCIe 4.0 SSD comes in up to 4TB of capacity. The 2TB version that we tested was the fastest overall in our benchmarks. Because the drive uses a host memory buffer design for cache, as opposed to onboard DRAM, it’s competitively priced, making it an excellent price-to-performance value.
2.
What is the best cheap NVMe SSD?
The best cheap SSD in our view is the WD Blue SN5000, followed closely by Kingston’s NV3. Both of these PCIe 4.0 SSDs are fast, and very affordable. However, when it comes to PCIe 5.0, the PNY CS2150 is your bargain choice.
3.
What is the best gaming SSD?
Essentially, gaming consoles are computers so the same SSDs that are best for PCs are the also best for gaming consoles. That said, the excellent performance and super-generous TBW rating of Seagate’s Game Drive PS5 SSD makes it our current choice. The DRAM design (which uses onboard memory for secondary caching) results in class-leading random ops performance, as well a full compatibility with PS5.
4.
What is best SATA SSD?
Our current favorite SATA SSD is the Samsung 870 EVO. It’s fast and affordable. However, if you want top capacity, check out the $1700 VectoTech 16TB V-MAX.
5.
What is the best cheap SATA SSD?
The current best buy when in comes to bargain SSDs is the Crucial BX500. It’s fast enough, and dirt cheap.
6.
What’s the difference between an SSD and HDD?
An SSD, or solid state drive, is a non-mechanical device that uses non-volatile memory (generally NAND) to store data. An HDD, or hard disk drive, is mechanical and stores data on spinning platters as magnetic marks. Read/write heads traverse the platter to seek and transfer data. Because of all the moving parts on an HDD, they have a higher chance of failure over time.
7.
Are SSDs good for long-term storage?
SSDs are excellent for long-term storage, though that depends on what you consider long term. Theoretically, the NAND memory cells, which are voltage traps, could leak over time and become unreadable, but in the decade or so that SSDs have been in heavy use, we’ve not seen this type of degradation. Short answer, a couple of decades, yes; a couple of millennia, perhaps not.
8.
What is the best SSD brand for PC?
If you want the best guarantees look to Seagate. Samsung and WD are also long-standing favorites with well-earned reputations for quality products.
That said,nearly all the second-tier vendors and even some of the top-tier companies use the highly competent industry bigwig Phison for their SSD designs. In other words, there aren’t any real dogs among relatively well-known SSD sellers.
External USB/Thunderbolt SSDs and/or hard drives (aka direct-attached storage, or DAS) are a super-convenient way to add storage capacity to your system as well as back it up. External drives are also extremely handy for transporting data between locations and devices in what used to be known as sneaker-net.
PROMOTION
High Capacity Bus-powered USB-C desktop
Get in touch with total storage freedom. Revolutionize your workflows with game-changing convenience and ease. High-capacity with bus-powered single-cable USB-C connectivity, Seagate One Touch desktop external hard drive delivers a fuss-free, clutter-free backup experience that lets you work anywhere, anytime.
Your particular needs will determine whether your choice for external storage should prioritize speed, in which case you’ll want an SSD with a fast interface (USB4 or Thunderbolt); capacity, which will always favor more affordable hard drives; or portability — you can’t get more portable than a pocketable thumb drive. Depending on your intent, we’ve got picks for you.
Before you buy
Due to the current global shortage of NAND (Thanks, AI!), SSD prices have skyrocketed. Many of the prices quoted below and in the referred reviews will soon be, or are already out of date.
As of February 21, 2026 we’ve experienced at least two drives that performed well below expectations when used with their bundled cables. If your new external SSD doesn’t perform up to snuff, talk to the vendor about a firmware update, or use a Thunderbolt cable of suitable speed, which is how we solved the issue for testing. Thunderbolt cables are generally of far higher quality than some commodity USB cables.
Why you should trust PCWorld for external drive reviews and buying advice: It’s in our name! PCWorld’s reviewers have been testing PC hardware for decades. Our storage evaluations are thorough and rigorous, pushing the limits of every product — from performance benchmarks to the practicalities of daily use. As PC users ourselves, we know what makes a product stand out. Only the best external drives make this list.
Corsair EX300U – Best 10Gbps external SSD
Pros
Fastest 10Gbps SSD we’ve tested
Small profile
Magnetic attachement to metal surfaces
Cons
Almost as pricey as 20Gbps SSDs currently
Price When Reviewed:
1TB: $100 I 2TB: $180 I 4TB: $340
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Corsair EX300U?
In normal times, this is the recommended option for anyone looking for an affordable that’s still “fast enough” — or anyone who is currently saddled with a USB 3.2 port that’s limited to 10Gbps speed. But these are not normal times, so our advice is to check current prices before buying.
For instance, you can find this fantastic little magnetic square of a drive for 1TB / $117 on Amazon as of this writing. That’s about $17 more than it cost when I reviewed the drive, making it a still-reasonable price in this time of extreme NAND-price inflation. But if you want to step up to 2TB, Amazon is asking a jaw-dropping and $290. That’s more than the 2TB version of our favorite 20Gbps drive below.
Price disparities aside, the EX300U is the fastest 10Gbps SSD I’ve tested to date, besting the Teamgroup X2 Max listed below by a small margin. And unlike the latter, you can stick it to a metal object like a PC case via the circular magnet on the back. Note that aluminum is not particularly magnetic, so this doesn’t work with most Macs.
Corsair EX300U: Further considerations
The warranty on the EX300U is three years, which is the usual for external SSDs, but the 250TBW (terabytes that can be written) per terabyte of capacity is a little stingy. At least Corsair provides a TBW rating — most vendors don’t for external SSDs.
Still, the odds of anyone exceeding that TBW limit is rather low. Most of the time games are reading data, not writing it.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Teamgroup X2 Max?
Anyone seeking top-performance in the classic fits-easily-in-a-shirt-pocket thumb drive form-factor should be looking to the Teamgroup X2 Max. It’s small even for a thumb drive, and just as fast as almost any 10Gbps SSD — small or large — that we’ve tested.
The X2 Max uses NVMe storage internally which accounts for the performance. Externally, it conveniently provides both captive Type-C and Type-A connectors so you don’t have to drag around cables or adapters.
Teamgroup X2 Max: Further considerations
It’s relatively pricey compared to a commodity thumb drive, but the performance is well worth it. Put bluntly — there’s no better option if fast thumb drive storage is what you seek.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the PNY RP60?
If your laptop supports USB 3.2×2 for 20Gbps performance and you want to take full advantage of it, and/or you’re not the most careful person with hardware, this ruggedized external SSD is a practical way to ward off accidental damage.
The PNY RP60 offers more than just a rugged IP65-rated exterior that protects against dust and water droplets. It’s handsome and lightweight to boot, as well as an admirable performer, even besting one of the fastest 20Gbps drives I’ve tested — the Crucial X10 Pro — in a couple of our tests.
PNY60: Further considerations
A 20Gbps SSD is the sweet spot in the price/performance ratio for external SSDs. The only issue is that the USB 3.2×2 drives function at only 10Gbps or slower unless attached to a dedicated 20Gbps port. That applies to most USB4 and Thunderbolt ports as well.
The RP60 is competitively priced at $180 and $230 for 1TB and 2TB, respectively. Note that these prices are significantly higher than when I first reviewed the RP60 due to the global NAND shortage.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Addlink P30?
Those looking for USB4 performance without breaking the bank should be shopping Addlink’s P30. It’s priced more like a 10Gbps SSD than a 40Gbps model, and while it’s the slowest USB4 drive we’ve tested, that’s like saying it’s the slowest F1 car on the grid — it’s still plenty fast.
Additionally, the P30 is super handy for anyone looking to add semi-permanent external storage to a PC with a metal case — there’s a magnetic ring that allows you to “stick” the drive in place. Add in a small form-factor and good looks and you have yourself a winner.
Addlink P30: Further considerations
Using modern TLC, the P30’s write rate only drops to around 800Mbps when it runs out of secondary cache. That makes it a workable drive even for pros. It’s also one of the few drives that is likely a better bargain than rolling your own with an external enclosure such as TerraMaster’s D1 SSD Plus.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Adata SE920?
If you want top-notch sustained throughput, but for less money than an 80Gbps SSD, the 40Gbps SE920 will get the job done and then some. Note that to run a 40Gbps USB4 external SSD, your PC needs to support the USB4 or the Thunderbolt 3/4/5 spec. And while cheaper than 80Gbps, it’s still not cheap.
If you meet those criteria, the Adata SE920 will deliver you nearly 4GBps transfers, and at a slightly more affordable price than our previous pick for USB4, the OWC Express 1M2 — for example, $280 for a 1TB Adata SE920 versus $300 for the 1TB OWC drive. If you want a lot of capacity, the Adata SE920 is available with up to 4TB, but it’s currently in short supply and has become very expensive.
Adata SE920: Further considerations
In almost every benchmark, the SE920 beat the OWC Express 1M2, even if by small margins. A nifty built-in fan is activated by sliding open the enclosure. In my tests, the fan helped keep my drive noticeably free of heat during benchmark tests.
Measuring around 4.1 inches long by 2.5-inches wide by 0.6-inches thick, and weighing 7 ounces, the SE920 is quite portable, giving it another advantage over the bulkier OWC Express 1M2 and others.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the SanDisk Desk Drive?
Anyone who needs lots of room for data plus the speed of an SSD should be shopping for the SanDisk Desk Drive, which is available with up to 8TB of capacity.
As the name suggests, the SanDisk Desk Drive isn’t nearly as portable as the other drives in this list. Partly because it’s a bit too bulky for a pocket or laptop bag, but primarily because it requires an AC adapter. It’s hardly a behemoth; it’s just not as convenient as a pure bus-powered unit for transport.
The Desk Drive is aimed at users with more sedentary work scenarios, to function as auxiliary storage and a fast backup medium. That’s also evident in the fact that it ships only in 4GB and 8GB capacities.
SanDisk Desk Drive: Further considerations
Granted, the Desk Drive costs a lot more per-gigabyte than you’d pay for a backup hard drive. But that surcharge buys you brisk 10Gbps performance, and the assurance that comes from an SSD’s lack of moving parts, i.e. susceptibility to wear and shock damage. In other words, its speed, ruggedness, and reliability make it worth more than an HDD.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the WD Passport, Works with USB-C?
Those looking for capacity without the high price should be looking at 2.5-inch external hard drives, and this capacious drive in particular.
We can forgive the cumbersome name, and the fact that this drive, misleadingly, doesn’t actually feature a Type-C port (but rather an adapter), because there is a misconception among some that Type-C will make a portable hard drive faster. It won’t. In the end this drive has the best combination of price, capacity, and performance in its class.
For starters, the WD My Passport, Works with USB-C offers a ton of capacity — up to 6TB — and at a far more affordable price per terabyte than one can get from an SSD (a little less than $30/TB versus $60 to $80 for the latter). This makes the WD My Passport a natural fit for backup, particularly during off hours when an SSD’s superior speed won’t really save you any time.
WD Passport, Works with USB-C: Further considerations
As for the misleading moniker, the My Passport does indeed work with USB-C, but it’s by way of the drive’s bundled Micro-B to Type-A cable and Type-A to USB-C adapter. Yup, the port is the much older Micro-B. Mind you, WD’s My Passport Ultra drives, which actually do feature a USB-C port, don’t perform any faster than this drive, and cost a bit more.
In fact, the My Passport performs on par with the best of 2.5-inch hard drives we’ve tested, while being the best deal. If it’s a portable, high-capacity hard drive that you’re after — pick this one.
Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide
Who should buy the Seagate Expansion Desktop?
Users looking for the most capacity for the least amount of cash, should definitely be checking out the 3.5-inch Seagate Expansion Desktop. It’s available with up to 28TB of capacity — more than three times the current maximum for SSDs
The Desktop Expansion also delivers twice the sustained transfer rate of the average 2.5-inch external hard drives — our 16TB test unit read and wrote at close to 280MBps. Nice.
As mentioned, all this storage comes at a very competitive price point, hovering around $30 per terabyte, compared to the $70 per terabyte an external SSD costs.
Seagate Expansion Desktop: Further considerations
The relevant caveat with all HDDs is that they are more likely to fail than SSDs, and important data on them should be backed up regularly. Alternatively, you can run them in mirrored (RAID 1) pairs, though that cuts into the bargain price per terabyte by quite a bit.
As we said in our review of the drive: “If you deal with large amounts of data, you can’t beat a high-capacity hard drive for gathering it into one place.” This is the drive we’d pick for that job.
Asus TUF Gaming A2: Offers a rugged DIY external SSD option for USB3.2×2.
External hard drives
Seagate One Touch USB hard drive: Using a 3.5 hard drive, and models expected to reach up to 24TB, this is one of the cheapest ways to add terabytes to your system.
How PCWorld tests external drives
Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4,800MHz modules (64GB of memory total). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are integrated and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. SSDs involved in the test are mounted in either a HighPoint 7604A 16x 4-slot PCIe 5.0 RAID adapter card or a single-slot Asus ROG M.2 PCIe 5.0 adapter.
We run the CrystalDiskMark 8, AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 synthetic benchmarks to find the storage device’s potential performance, then a series of 48GB and 450GB transfers tests using Windows Explorer drag-and-drop to show what you’ll see under Window, as well as the far faster FastCopy to show what’s possible. A two-drive 25GBps RAID 0 array on the HighPoint 7604A 16x PCIe 5.0 adapter card is used as the secondary source/destination.
Each test is performed on an NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This can be less of a factor with the current crop of SSDs with far faster late-generation NAND.
Caveat: The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive we were shipped and to the capacity tested. SSD performance can and will vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching. Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report, by all means, let us know.
Note also that some of the SSDs in this roundup were tested using other equipment and methodologies which you can read about in the standalone reviews.
Jon L Jacobi has witnessed storage morph from punch cards and tape to solid state. He’s been using and testing HDDs, SATA SSDs, and NVMe SSDs for PCWorld for well over two decades. To paraphrase a well-known commercial, you might say he’s seen a thing or two.
How to choose the best external drive
Yes, USB 4 will provide the same massive throughput as Thunderbolt 3/4.
There are four general categories when it comes to external storage, all fairly self-explanatory: portable SSD, portable HDD, desktop HDD (typically larger capacity, larger footprint, and requiring external power, and thus meant to be stationary), and thumb-drive SSD — the smallest and most portable external storage, but often limited in capacity.
SSD vs. HDD
If you’re looking to treat your external storage as an extension of your internal storage, then performance is likely paramount. You’ll want an SSD, which can be 10 to 20 times faster — depending on the interface — than a hard drive. SSDs also offer sub-millisecond seek times where HDDs seek at tens of milliseconds.
On the other hand, if the primary role is backup, then you might want to opt for a hard drive (HDD) with its larger capacity and a significantly lower price per gigabyte/terabyte. Currently, single SSDs top out at 8TB, 2.5-inch HDDs at 6TB, and desktop 3.5-inch HDDs at 36TB.
The cost per TB of both SSDs and HDDs tends to drop as capacity increases. However, the latest, greatest (highest capacity) drives of both types tend to carry a premium, simply because the company knows some users want as much capacity as they can get and are willing to pay more.
Normally, you’ll get the lowest price per terabyte from the second-highest capacity drive, aka last years model. But do the math before you plunk down your hard earned money — you may find deals. Below you can see the phenomenon in terms of a WD 2.5-inch HDD.
The worst value for an external hard drive is typically the lowest-capacity drive.
IDG
Above you can see the general more capacity, cheaper per terabyte trend.
How much external storage capacity do you need?
If you’re extending your internal storage, you probably know better than we do how much you’ll need. Video sucks up space at a remarkable pace, especially at higher resolutions. With SSDs, traditionally we’ve recommended twice the capacity you think you’ll need as older types tended to slow down as they filled. Modern SSD controller design has mitigated this to a great degree, but it’s still our rule of thumb.
If you’re going for backup, then the more the merrier. Again, twice the amount of total data on the drives to back up is a good start. Remember, you’ll want at least one full system backup, then regular incremental, differential, or data-only backups.
That said, reinstalling Windows and your applications isn’t quite the insane drudgery it once was, and you can likely get away with just backing up your data. In that case twice the amount of essential data you have will do the trick. Sensing a 2X trend here?
Another rule of thumb: 1TB for travel and light backups, 2TB for mainstream photo/video libraries, 4TB+ for larger archives, 8TB+ for desk-bound bulk backup.
Note that these are our minimum recommendations. The more the merrier, and the further back in time you can keep backups for.
Which external interface should you opt for?
Speed
If you’re buying an HDD, the interface is relatively unimportant — even older 5Gbps USB offers more than enough bandwidth to accommodate the 300MBps that is as fast as a modern HDD can deliver data. In fact, you’re unlikely to run across an external HDD that offers a faster interface unless it’s a multi-bay RAID box. Even then, 10Gbps is likely to be more than fast enough.
For SSDs, there’s a huge difference in performance depending on the interface involved. The internals of most external SSDs these days are NVMe rather than SATA, and capable of 3GBps. No matter what the internals, 5Gbps USB (3.0) limits the drive to just over 500MBps, 10Gbps USB (3.2) to just over 1GBps, and 20Gbps USB (3.2×2)/Thunderbolt 2 to around 2GBps, so you’re leaving performance on the table with any of those.
Of course, those may be all that your computer offers, so buy to match. However, if you’re rocking a newer computer you may have Thunderbolt 3/4/5 or if it’s really recent, USB4. Those will deliver around 3.5GBps unless they’re the still rare 80Gbps flavors in which case you’ll see around 6.5GBps.
Note that all those numbers are what you’ll see with synthetic benchmarks. Windows Explorer is a horrible performer in data transfers. We recommend using FastCopy or if you’re a command line type — Xcopy. Both of which are two to three times as fast as Explorer transferring large files.
Compatibility
Compatibility is a major concern and where 5Gbps and 10Gbps USB reign supreme. You’d be hard pressed to find a computer or device that won’t support them and they function on nearly every USB and Thunderbolt port in existence.
USB 3.2×2 on the other hand requires a dedicated 20Gbps port or a newer USB4 port to function at the full 20Gbps speed. They drop to 10Gbps on 10Gbps USB ports and most Thunderbolt ports.
Obviously, 40Gbps USB4 requires a USB4 port or Thunderbolt 4/5 port to reach maximum speed. But on USB4 ports, even that’s not guaranteed. We haven’t seen one yet, but full 40Gbps implementation in true USB Forum fashion, isn’t required, so there might be slower 20Gbps USB4 SSDs and ports.
Thunderbolt SSDs generally require a Thunderbolt 3/4/5 port or USB4 port to function at 40Gbps. In truth, USB4 is basically Thunderbolt 4 with some minor tweaks. 80Gbps Thunderbolt SSDs require a Thunderbolt 5 port, and/or the upcoming 80Gbps USB4 second gen.
USB4 SSDs are easily the most compatible (backwards to USB 2.x, forward to Thunderbolt 5) high-performance types, so they’re currently our recommended interface for speedy data delivery. That said, 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 is pretty sexy.
What connector type should you use?
Though the industry is generally on board with Type-C connectors at this point, you may still find some older types around. From top to bottom in the image below: Mini-USB, Micro B SuperSpeed, SuperSpeed Micro B, Thunderbolt 2/mini DisplayPort, and Type-C. You’ll also find the occasional Lightning connector drive (not shown). More complete descriptions follow below.
While we of course recommend orientation-agnostic Type-C, you can find Type-C adapters or adapter cables for any type.
The top drive uses the older, slower Mini-USB interface. The second drive features the connector that replaced it: Micro B SuperSpeed. The Orange drive features both a SuperSpeed Micro B and Thunderbolt 2 (mini DisplayPort connector). The bottom drive features USB-C or USB Type C.
Connectors
USB Type-C, USB-C, Type-C is the latest USB connector and the one the world is standardizing on. It’s small, easy to insert, and you don’t have to worry about which side faces up as with Type-A.
Keep in mind that Type-C refers only to the connector itself. What is carried over the wires varies greatly: USB 2.0 High Speed (480Mbps) to USB 3.2 SuperSpeed 20Gbps, as well as USB4 and Thunderbolt 3/4/5 and any combination of them.
USB Type-A: You won’t find this familiar rectangular port on any drive, but you will still find it on plenty of PCs and laptops as well as the male version on the other end of most Type-B and Type-C adapter cables.
USB 3 Micro-B is the wider, flatter port that’s still very common on many lower-cost portable and desktop external hard drives. It’s actually the same Micro USB port used on older phones, but with more data lines to hit USB 3.0 speeds. It’ll do 5Gbps and is fine for hard drives and SATA (internally) SSDs. Micro-B cables are generally Type-A on the PC end.
USB 3 Type-B is the larger, squarer version of USB 3.0 Micro B. Type B ports are becoming rare, though you might find one on older 5.25-inch enclosures, printers, and scanners. It supports speeds up to 5Gbps and cables are generally Type-A on the PC side.
Thunderbolt 2 is dead at this point. It’s found on older Macs, but even Apple put it out to pasture in 2017. There’s no need to invest in a Thunderbolt 2 drive unless it’s for legacy support issues. That said…
…Apple sells a bi-directional Thunderbolt 1/2 to 3 adapter if you need to connect the one generation to the other. The adapter does not, however, carry power, so bus-powered external drives (no power jack) will require a powered dock.
eSATA is another legacy port that’s disappeared from newer devices. Created for attaching external storage to your computer’s SATA bus, eSATA was a cheap way in its day to move beyond the toddling 60MBps performance of USB 2.0.
5Gbps USB 3.0 put the last nail in eSATA’s coffin. As with Thunderbolt 2, the only reason to invest in an eSATA drive is for use with older computers.
Multiple drives for backup?
We discussed the rule of three for backup, but while the cloud is a great offsite option, you can also manage that with multiple external drives — storing them in different locations. Once upon a time, I used to regularly send copies of my recordings to my mom’s for safe-keeping.
If you’re using your external storage as a primary repository for important data, then you should have a second drive as a copy. You might even consider a dual-drive enclosure and run them mirrored, i.e. the same set of data written simultaneously to both. SSDs aren’t nearly as prone to mishap as hard drives, but even then…
Consumers have a lot of excellent external SSDs to choose from. If speed is important, the best 40Gbps external drive is the Adata SE920 at 40Gbps; for 20Gbps performance, and a significant cost savings, consider the PNY RP60; for the best balance of performance and price, we recommend the 10Gbps Corsair EX300U.
2.
What’s the best USB thumb drive?
Currently, the Teamgroup X2 Max is the pick of the litter. It’s super slim, but capacious, cheetah fast, and has both Type-C and Type-A connectors.
HDDs (hard disk drives) are essentially boxes containing spinning platters with read/write arms that skim across them to detect the orientation of, or re-align particles in the magnetic material that coats the platters.
SSDs (solid state drives), on the other hand, use flash memory and have no moving parts inside the drive. Data is instead stored in cells — aka, voltage traps — which are interconnected in a matrix. The matrix approach allows for data to be pushed or pulled to/from many different places at once and significantly increases both read and write speed — on the order of 100 times faster currently.
Generally speaking, SSDs are a better bet for your external drives due to their smaller size, faster speeds, and far superior durability. The main drawback to SSDs is that you pay quite a bit more per terabyte of storage. As technology and production techniques improve, the price of SSDs has and will continue to drop.
5.
How often should you back up your data?
As often as possible, i.e. at roughly the rate that it changes. This is especially true if you are working on an important project or have data that you absolutely cannot afford to lose. The key point here is that if your drive goes belly up, everything added since your last backup is toast.
If you have your external drive connected to your computer at all times, it is a good idea to automate the backup process and have the drive back up your data as it changes, or every hour or so. Otherwise, connect and back up at least once a day. See our roundups of the best Windows backup software and the best online backup services to learn more.
Even if you work with your data in the cloud, a local backup is a very good idea. We know of no major service that’s lost data, but there’s always a first time.
6.
Why does Windows say my external drive is smaller than specified?
This is because of the difference between the binary and decimal number systems, their nomenclatures, and a Microsoft miscue. Your 2TB drive indeed has two trillion bytes of storage, and if you look at the byte count that Windows displays in a drive’s properties dialog, this should be what you see. This, in the International System of Units (SI/decimal), is two terabytes, or 2TB. This is the standard language vendors use as consumers are far more familiar with base 10.
However, Windows uses the newer International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) binary multiples 2^10 (Kibibyte/KiB), 2^20 (Mebibyte/MiB), 2^30 (Gibibyte/Gib). Binary multiples are larger numbers (one KiB is 1,024) so when Windows divides the total bytes by the IEC system, the you get something like 1.8TiB for a 2TB drive. Alas, Windows labels this as 1.8TB, misleading the user.
Other reasons you might not see as much available storage in the properties tab are formatting or partitioning. The file system uses some storage for file location and size info, etc. Also, some drives come with a small partition containing software so the main partition will be smaller than the drive’s total capacity.
7.
How long will my external drive last?
The lifespan of an external hard drive can be anywhere from three minutes to 10 years or more depending on make and model, as well as the amount of use and operating environment. They’re mechanical devices subject to wear and susceptible to shock damage, so they should be kept cool and treated gently. Reliability has increased dramatically over the last decade.
Alas, judging the likely lifespan of an external hard drive is a crap shoot. Of course check the warranty, but the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) number is generally considered fantasy within the industry. Peruse user feedback which can provide insight into long term usage, and keep your ears peeled for strange noises, your fingers crossed, and don’t drop the thing! Our best guess is that you should get at least five years with careful handling.
SSDs don’t wear out or break mechanically, but their cells can only be written to so many times. SSDs generally have a TBW (terabytes that may be written) rating, but this is rarely provided by vendors for external SSDs. Hint: They may not use the same SSD inside throughout the product lifespan.
Most internal M.2 NVMe TLC SSDs are rated for around 600TBW per terabyte, and QLC types for around 200TBW, though the type of NAND in use is also rarely provided by vendors. That’s a lot of data, and a lot of SSDs are rated well below what they might achieve. You can guesstimate by using a utility to see how much data you write to an SSD a day and then doing the math.
External SSD warranties are generally between three and five years, but as with all such things, it’s a financial risk calculation for the company. As is the TBW. Our best guess based on experience is perhaps a decade. However, certain models have had issues long before that — generally due to a flaw or failure in the bridge chip or controller.
8.
How do external drives fail?
There are a few of ways that an external hard drive might fail. The motor might quit, the read/write heads might crash into the platter surface due to shock while operating, or the electronics might overheat and go belly up. You might get a warning in the form of strange noises such as a scraping or grinding sound. If the data is particularly important, turn it off immediately and call a recovery service. That scraping sound may be the coating on the platter being removed by a crashed head. This is unrecoverable. If you keep running it, back it up immediately and replace it.
SSDs generally go belly up due to the increasingly rare controller failure, which is a relatively easy fix/reset for someone who knows the SSD’s internals such as a recovery service. SSDs will also eventually wear out, though this only precludes further writing to the unit. You can still read what’s on the drive, so it’s not the disaster a HDD failure can be.
9.
What’s the fastest external interface?
In order, the fastest PC external interfaces are currently: 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5, 40Gbps USB4/Thunderbolt 3 and 4, 20Gbps USB 3.2×2, 10GBps USB 3.2, then 5Gbps USB 3.x.
10.
What’s the most compatible external interface?
In order of compatibility: USB4, Thunderbolt 3/4/5, USB 3.x, USB 3.2×2, USB 3.x, USB 2, and USB 1.1.
Login
