External Hard Drives

With a sharp increase in media and documents being digitized in our modern era, there arises a need to have more space to store all the data — and external hard drives are the solution. Working just like a traditional internal hard disk drive (HDD) but in an external format, it’s one of many essential computer accessories to have on hand whether you own a laptop or a desktop computer, so you can easily expand your storage capacity without touching the inner workings of your computer. These external storage drives also let you quickly create a file backup in case of emergency, or offload batches of files for simple transfer to another computer. People who use laptops love how they can work from anywhere, but they often pick up a portable hard drive that easily fits in their laptop bag and doesn’t require a power source. Desktop computers more commonly have greater storage space than laptops, but there may come a time when more space is needed, and it isn’t ready for an upgrade just yet. USB hard drives that plug into an open USB port via hard drive cables can be portable or kept on your desk, depending on their size. Some people like to use wireless external hard drives that plug into an electrical outlet, connect using Wi-Fi and serve as a personal cloud storage option, which can give you more capacity per dollar than a portable version. Hard drives in general are relatively inexpensive and can give you a lot of extra storage space for your money, depending on what extra amount of storage space you might need.

Best Buy carries external hard drives for laptops and desktops in different amounts of terabytes (TB) for a variety of uses. Whether you have a small number of personal files that you want to add to a backup disk or a large amount of data that your laptop doesn’t have room for, you’re able to choose the amount of external hard drive terabytes for your specific situation, ranging from around 1TB to 12TB. If you frequently work with large files or multiple files at once — for instance, opening large albums of high-resolution photos, editing high-definition videos, or PC gaming — you might want to get at least an 8TB external hard drive that’s able to accommodate that volume. While it’s true that there are cloud file-sharing services for sending large files, there are instances where you need to deliver a hard copy as well, say, to a client for whom you recently finished a project. In this case, a 1TB external hard drive is probably plenty and is a low monetary investment on your part for a device that you aren’t going to keep. If you have physical collections of movies and music and are into minimizing the clutter in your home, you could look into buying either a 2TB external hard drive or 4TB external hard drive to transfer CDs and DVDs onto, depending on how many cases you’d like to clear out. You’ll also want to keep in mind what connectivity options your brand and model of computer includes. If you have a newer computer designed with a USB Type C port, you’ll need a compatible USB-C external hard drive. If you still need help deciding on the best external hard drive for you, just ask a Best Buy Blue Shirt or Geek Squad® Agent, and they’ll be happy to answer any questions.