PORTABLE HARD DRIVE STORAGE

Slimline storage under $100 to pop in your bag and go

- HOWARD OAKLEY

ON TEST...

> LaCie Mobile Drive 2TB

> SanDisk Professional

> G-DRIVE Armor ATD 2TB

> Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB

> Toshiba Canvio Flex 2TB

> Verbatim Store 'n' Go

> Alu Slim 2TB

> WD My Passport 2TB

HARD DRIVES MIGHT be unfashionable right now, but for less than half the price of most equivalent external solid-state drives (SSDs) these products deliver two terabytes (TB) of versatile mobile storage. Whether you're commuting your documents between home and office, out on the road with your MacBook Pro, or just need somewhere convenient to keep your backups safe, the portable hard drives in this test will do the job efficiently and at significantly lower cost.

At best, hard drives are only about one third the speed of a basic USB-C SSD, so they're too slow to start your Mac up from regularly, although they can do so in an emergency. You also would not want to use them for heavy, disk-intensive tasks like editing high-res video, when they can't compete against fast but much more expensive SSDs.

But when you need to move a great many documents around and don't want to pay hundreds of dollars to do so, there's still nothing to beat a good portable hard drive. Assembled here are six of the best to suit your pocket in both size and cost.

How we tested

Measuring hard drive performance isn't simple, as speed varies across the disk platter, and Macs now use two file systems. We used Stibium to measure read and write rates on randomly-ordered test files from 2MB to 2GB in size, with both HFS+ and APFS volumes.