We’re in the thick of the best online shopping season of the year with plenty Cyber Week deals still on the table, but with the second day of Cyber Week now behind us, time is running out to score a discounted external hard drive before the holidays arrive. If you’re in need of some cheap storage for all your digital photos, videos, work files, and other goodies, then lot of the best brands (from Western Digital and Seagate to Samsung and others) are still on sale right now at the lowest prices you’ll see until 2021.
These extended Cyber Week external hard drive deals are joined by all sorts of other still-ongoing Cyber Week bargains on computers, gaming equipment, and mobile devices. So once you’ve narrowed down which external hard drive you want (our buying guide below can help you with that), be sure to jump on it before these deals dry up for good.
Best Cyber Week external hard drive deals
One of the hottest sales today is a Seagate 2TB hard drive deal going on at Amazon. See more discounts below:
How to choose an external hard drive
There are still a lot of very appealing Cyber Week external hard drive deals to choose from right now — so many, in fact, that the choice can be overwhelming. What you really need to ask yourself is which one best suits your needs. Are you often on the go without fast Wi-Fi and want to bring all your files with you when traveling, even if that trip is just to a nearby café? Will your external hard drive mainly be for gaming? How much space do you need, and will that change over time? External hard drives range from 1TB pocket drives that fit right in your pocket to 12TB backup monuments that are meant to sit under your desk and stay there. To help you decide, we’ve laid out the best external hard drives from which to choose.
Your first decision is the size of storage versus portability. For the latter, we love the Samsung T5 SSD, which packs a huge amount of storage into a tiny, portable design. If you’re dealing with some older machinery, and you want something that can handle USB A and B connections, we prefer the SanDisk Extreme Pro as a top of the line lightweight external drive. And if you’re more professional, and perhaps your needs include lightning-fast video storage, there’s the Western Digital My Book Duo, which can store up to 28TB. Ask yourself if you need to move data around regularly, as in from one computer to another (home to work for example) or if you’re working with one primary machine.
Next, you need to ask yourself what you’ll be using this hard drive for. Is it just for storage? In this case, your decision is pretty simple, and you can go back to figuring out just what size is right for you. But, if you have a job (or hobby) where you are regularly reading and writing to your external drive (many professionals, like architects, engineers, photographers, and video editors are doing this constantly), you have more to consider. For one, you’ll essentially want something with high read and write speeds. Part of this decision is SSD versus HDD (SDD tends to be more reliable, smaller, faster, sturdier, and more expensive). While a contemporary HDD can be pretty fast, with 7,200 rpm being the standard, some are still limping along at 5,400 rpm, so double-check what speed you’re getting. Regardless, SSD drives measure their random access times in microseconds rather than milliseconds, so they tend to be way faster.
Additionally, you’ll want to consider the drive’s connectivity. If it doesn’t have the current USB 3.0 technology, you might want to give it a second look. An older connection can bottleneck speeds of even the faster SSD or HDDs, and you don’t want to cut your read and write speed off at the legs.
