The Best External Hard Drives and SSDs You Can Get Right Now

By

Mark Knapp,

a veteran writer covering computers, peripherals, audio, and mobile.

If you’ve been shopping for an external drive (or any other computing or mobile device lately), you may have noticed that prices have skyrocketed. Why? As the AI industry explodes, it’s been buying up RAM (the memory chips that everything from mobile phones to data centers rely on), driving up pricing on everything in tech that uses memory — which is more or less everything. But since storage devices use lots of it, drive shoppers are really feeling the pinch: SSDs in the popular 1 TB size are going for nearly double what they cost back in 2024.