Since many desktop drives nowadays offer similar performance, the less expensive they are, the better. Although a higher-capacity drive is more cost-effective per terabyte, 8 TB external desktop hard drives are nearly twice as expensive as 4 TB drives, for more storage than most people need. Anything faster isn’t necessary for hard drives, because they’re limited by disk speed, not the USB interface. This round, we considered only those drives with USB 3.0 connections.
Speed: Most of the drives we’ve tested in 2018 are about the same speed, and we haven’t seen major speed increases in desktop hard drives over the past few years.The vast majority of drives from these major manufacturers will be fine, but it’s still possible to buy a bad egg that will die too soon. Only three companies still manufacture hard drives-Western Digital (which also makes HGST drives), Seagate, and Toshiba-and all of them make reliable drives. Reliability: Although reliability is the most important factor for any storage device, solid information on drive reliability can be hard to come by.
