The best external hard drives are an essential part of any creative's kit. Whether you're backing up a shoot in the field, archiving finished projects, or moving large files between machines, the drive you choose has a direct impact on your workflow... and on the safety of work you can't afford to lose.
Unlike cloud storage, a physical drive keeps your data entirely under your control, with no subscription fees, no bandwidth limits, and no latency. But with dozens of options available across wildly different price points and connection standards, the choice is genuinely confusing.
The best external hard drive overall
The SanDisk Extreme Pro USB4 is the external drive we'd recommend to most creatives, and for good reason. It combines the kind of transfer speeds that used to require a Thunderbolt connection with a genuinely rugged, pocketable design; making it as useful on a shoot in the rain as it is on a desk in a studio.
The headline number is 3,800 MB/s, which is the maximum read speed over a USB4 connection. In practice, that means transferring a 10GB folder of RAW files in seconds rather than minutes, and moving finished video projects between machines without the kind of wait that breaks your train of thought. If your computer has a USB4 port (and increasingly, new Macs and Windows laptops do) you'll feel the difference immediately.
The IP65 rating means it's protected against dust ingress and sustained water jets, not merely splashes. For photographers and filmmakers working outdoors, on location, or anywhere that a drive might get knocked, dropped or caught in the rain, that level of protection matters. The rubberised casing absorbs impacts, and the design is compact enough to slip into a jacket pocket without thinking about it. The trade-off is price: you'll pay more per gigabyte than you would for the WD below, and the full speed benefit only comes through if you have a USB4 port to plug into.
Read more: SanDisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD review
Best budget external hard drive
The WD My Passport SSD has been on the market since 2017. So the fact that it's still one of our favourite external drives tells you everything you need to know.
It's significantly cheaper than the SanDisk above while still delivering 1,050 MB/s read speeds over USB 3.2. For everyday tasks (transferring photos from a shoot, backing up a project, moving files between home and studio), that's more than fast enough, and most people won't feel the difference in most workflows.
Security is better than you'd expect at this price, too. The WD Discovery app gives you access to hardware encryption, password protection and automatic backup software, meaning client work and sensitive files are protected even if the drive is lost or stolen. Setup is straightforward out of the box and the drive works across both Mac and PC without reformatting.
The main gripe is the cable, which is almost comically short: you'll be hunting for an extension within the first week. The drive also runs warm during sustained heavy transfers, though not to a degree that affects performance.
Read more: WD My Passport SSD review
Best external hard drive for photographers
For photographers who work with large files and need to move them fast, the Crucial X10 occupies a category of its own. You get up to 8TB of storage in a very small device and extremely fast transfer speeds of 2,100 MB/s.
That speed matters when you're backing up a day's shoot on location, importing large RAW or ProRes files into an editing suite, or delivering finished work to a client under time pressure. The X10's USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface achieves these speeds on compatible hardware, and it also works over USB4 and Thunderbolt ports, meaning it won't become a bottleneck as your equipment evolves.
While most portable SSDs top out at 2TB or 4TB, the X10 goes up to 8TB: enough to archive multiple large projects, keep a full client library on hand, or store an entire season of high-resolution footage without reaching for a second drive. The physical footprint remains genuinely compact throughout: at 50 x 65 x 10mm, it fits easily in a camera bag pocket or a jeans pocket without bulk.
At $164 / £179.99 for the 2TB version, it costs more than the WD at equivalent capacities, and the absence of an activity light is a shame. But overall, photographers, videographers and content creators who regularly move large volumes of data will love it.
Read more: Crucial X10 SSD review
