By Jason Murdock

Published: Monday, 14 February 2022 at 12:00 am


If your computer or laptop is constantly giving you warnings that it’s running out of storage space, it’s time to invest in an external hard drive.

Even though a lot of our movie and music collections are now mostly accessed via streaming services like Netflix or Spotify, it’s still pretty easy to fill up most standard machines with programs, files and personal images alone.

A lot of computers – especially the most affordable models – won’t come with a lot of storage. Some budget devices only offer 32 gigabytes (GB) or 64GB. To put that into perspective, Adobe recommends that you should have 16 GB or more storage space available if you want to install Photoshop. And that’s just one program.

But an external hard drive is not just a place to toss some old photos – it can be hugely helpful for larger backups – giving you peace of mind that content is safe and won’t be deleted or corrupted should your computer or laptop break.

But hold on a second before simply buying the external hard drive with the most capacity – there’s a little more to it than that. You will need to think about what ports are on your computer, how much space you actually need, how portable you require the external drive to be and whether it should be HDD or SSD.

We will explain everything in this guide, and recommend some top external hard drives that will offer you a range of storage capacities and speeds. Also in the market for a new computer? Be sure to read our guide to the best budget laptops.

All pricing in this article was correct at the time of publication.

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An external hard drive and laptop
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Top external hard drives at a glance

Top external drives: our recommendations

Great all-rounder: Toshiba Canvio Flex (1TB)

£42.99 | Buy now from Amazon

"Toshiba

Combining portability, affordability and storage capacity is the Toshiba Canvio Flex. It’s an HDD (USB 3.2) that’s preformatted to be compatible with both Mac and Windows computers. It’s bundled with USB-A and USB-C cables, has a sleek, silver finish and is small enough to pop in your coat pocket or travel bag. We chose the 1TB option as an all-rounder, but the Flex is available with up to 4TB of storage.