Among portable hard drives, the Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive (Est. $105 and up) looks like a top choice. It garners thousands of largely positive reviews at Amazon.com and BestBuy.com, and earns 4 out of 5 stars at CNET. Fast, rugged, compact and future-proof, the Blackbox Plus from Glyph is easily one of the best portable drives on the market. Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim Portable External Hard Drive.

Everything we do on our computers and laptops takes up space. Depending on what you’re working on, that content can be minimal or it can be massive. More often than not, you need a storage device at the ready to handle whatever you may need.

Thankfully, we have external hard drives which we can use as our own personal “library” systems. Today’s hard drives don’t just act as storage for tax files, photo galleries, and the like. You can use an external hard drive for video and game storage. You can place downloaded media on your external drive to save space on your computer. You can even use an external hard drive’s extra space to run a program.

There’s no denying that an external hard drive comes in handy. But there are so many on the market, it can be a hassle to figure out which one would work best for you. If you’re looking for a great hard drive and you’re ready to buy, please see our top recommendations. We've researched each one indepth.

If you’d like to learn more about external hard drives before diving into a purchase, please continue reading this shopping guide. • The Seagate 5TB offers the largest storage capacity on our list at five terabytes. At a cost of $148, it’s the winner of our “Best of the Best” title. A hard drive of this size could potentially hold 2,500 hours of films, 1.5 million photos, 5,000 hours of raw video, or 85,000 hours of music.

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(Bear in mind that these are only estimates.) • The Toshiba Portable clocks in at three terabytes. Firefox for mac 10.10.3. This hard drive costs $271 and could potentially hold hundreds of hours of films and television shows, thousands of hours of music, and an entire library of books. • The other three external hard drives on our list contain one terabyte of space. You could potentially store about 17,000 hours of music, 1,000 hours of raw video, over 300,000 photos, or 500 hours of films on a hard drive with one terabyte of space. All of that said, having an external drive with the most space isn’t always what’s important. You must also consider what you’ll be storing on the drive.

The figures above are estimates that might apply if you only stored that kind of data. If you use a drive to store multiple items in different file formats, the space changes. No matter what kind of hard drive you purchase, you will run into slow download times. It’s just the nature of technology; as you pass a file from one piece of tech to another, there’s no way to guarantee speed for uploading or downloading. That said, both Seagate models on our list — the Expansion 5TB and the Backup Plus — have been clocked at having some of the best download and upload times available across all forms of media and file transfers. With the exception of the Toshiba Canvio Connect II, the other models on our list are “middle of the road” in terms of speed.

The Toshiba is known to have slow downloading speeds when it comes to bigger files. While the products we recommend each have their own unique plastic casing design and features, only one of them has been designed to truly take a beating, and that’s the Silicon Power Rugged Armor A60. This particular model has been created to be shock-resistant and waterproof, so regardless of where you take it or what kind of problems it may run into, it keeps running. Shy of beating the device with a hammer or drowning it in water for an extended period of time, it should work after bad spills of any kind. External hard drives are designed to run for extended periods of time, but they don’t last forever. If you keep an external hard drive plugged into your computer or laptop continously, the heat and usage will eventually wear down the technology and make the device slow or unresponsive.