There are a lot of cloud storage services out there, and while a lot of folks probably rely on things like Google Drive and One Drive, it’s important to keep a local backup of your data still just to be sure. Luckily, external hard drives are still pretty common and have only improved in the past few years. In fact, some of them can even be connected directly to a phone, which can be a great benefit given a lot of the best phones on the market don’t come with a large amount of storage. So, whether you’ve taken advantage of one of the laptop deals or just want to grab yourself one of the best external hard drives out there, then there’s probably an option for you.
That’s why we’ve collected some of our favorite external hard drive deals below, although if you aren’t too keen on lugging around an external hard drive, there are a lot of solid internal SSD deals you can check out. Also, if you have a PS5, then you may consider expanding that storage too with these PS5 SSD deals.
If you have a lot of digital files you need to access while on the go or out in the field, LaCie’s Rugged Mini external hard drive has been where people like you have turned for years now. It’s available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, with this 2TB model often seeing a discount. The LaCie Rugged Mini is shock resistant up to four feet, and it’s dust and water resistant for all-terrain use. It connects to your laptop or other device via USB 3.0, which is up to four times faster than USB 2.0.
Western Digital has long been making affordable, portable, and mostly reliable external hard drives for some time. Its My Passport lineup is one of the most portable external hard drives out there, and though it utilizes spinning drives as opposed to solid state technology, that’s one of the things that makes these external drives so affordable. You can get a ton of storage space for cheap with a My Passport, with this 4TB model being a sweet spot in terms of pricing.
Seagate is the brand to turn to if you’re in search of as much portable hard drive space you can get your hands on for as little cost as possible. These portable drives reach up to 18 TB in capacity, and we picked the 6 TB model for a great value play. This hard drive is designed to work with Mac or PC and connects to devices via an included USB 3.0 cable. And if you have any concerns about whether such an affordable drive offers much reliability, you can purchase it knowing it’s backed by Seagate’s 1-year rescue service.
The Crucial X9 Pro is a great alternative if you don’t care so much about RG and want something fast and powerful that still comes with the latest USB 3.2 Gen2 standard. It has 2TB of storage, which is not too bad for the price, while having a read/write speed of 1,050 Mbps. It’s also relatively durable, able to handle a drop of up to 7.5 feet, so you should feel comfortable carrying it in a bag if you’re constantly on the move, while the 256-bit AES hardware encryption means that your files are safe, even if you do lose it.
If you have a gaming setup that’s full of RGB and you want to add a little bit to it while still extending your hard drive space, then you should absolutely grab this 8TB Seagate FireCuda Gaming. It has a customizable LED under the bottom lip of the hard drive, and it even comes with the latest 3.2 gen USB standard, so you can game off of it directly on your PC or older console. While you hopefully won’t need it, it also comes with 3-years of data recovery service, which is a nice plus at this price bracket.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends / Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Another great option for a rugged external hard drive is the Samsung T7 Shield, which takes the standard T7 model and wraps it in a resistant shell, giving it an IP65 rating and some defense against the element. As such, it’s a great option if you’re always on the road and need storage out in the wild, or at a concert. It’s also pretty fast, with a read speed up to 1,050 Mbps and a write speed up to 1,000 Mbps so if you have to transfer large files quickly, it’s perfect. Just be aware that you need a My Best Buy Plus membership to get access to the deal.
Western Digital Black hard drives are known for being excellent gaming HDDs, so if you need something that’s both high performance and high capacity, you can’t go wrong with this WD BLACK D10. It has a whopping 8TB of storage and rotates at 7200 rpm, giving you a read/write speed of around 250Mbps. While that’s not as fast as an SSD, the capacity is much cheaper if you try to buy the same capacity SSD, and if you aren’t playing the latest AAA games, that’s still pretty fast.
Sometimes, it’s all about storing a huge amount of files, and instead of going with something like a NAS, which can take a lot of space, the WD easystore is a great solution. While the deal we’ve picked has 14TB of storage, you can find models up to a rather dizzying 22 TB. That said, you do have to make some compromises, such as the fact that the WD easystore only has USB 3.0, so it’s not as fast as some other HDDs and SSDs on the list, and it’s also rather big and heavy, sitting at 32.6 ounces. Even so, if your primary interest is just pure storage space, it’s hard to compete with the WD easystore for compactness. You can also get an extra $20 off with a My Best Buy Plus membership, bringing it down to just $250.
If you’re looking for as much storage as possible, one of today’s best external hard drive deals is on the Western Digital Easystore external hard drive. It comes in with a whopping 22TB of storage space and an impressive price point of just $400. This is a savings of $200 from its regular price of $600. Many of the best SSDs also make a great external storage option, as they’re even more portable than external drives with spinning disks, as well as much faster. The 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro external SSD is seeing an impressive discount of $120 right now, bringing its price down from $295 to just $175.
The first two steps of choosing an external hard drive are setting your budget and determining what size you need. As cheap as storage is per gigabyte nowadays, the classic trade-off of hard drive size versus portability still holds; basically, is your primary consideration storage space or physical size? If your external hard drive is for home and office use at a single workstation and will more or less sit in one place, then storage space is more valuable than mobility. If, on the other hand, you’re frequently ferrying data around from one PC to the next, then a portable hard drive might be a better choice, even if you’re sacrificing some storage space for a smaller footprint.
What exactly you are using your hard drive for will also factor into your purchase decision. If your external HDD or SSD is just for file storage, then this is rather simple, but if you’re going to be regularly reading and writing to your external storage (for example, doing video editing right from the drive itself rather than from your computer’s system drive), you’ll want to be sure you get something that has good read and write speeds and that uses up-to-date connectivity standards such as USB 3.0. For more details about external hard drive designs and features to look for when making your purchase decision, read on.
HDD vs. SSD
Storage drives mostly fall into two main categories: traditional hard drives, or HDDs, and solid-state drives, or SSDs. Most hard drives, until recently, were mechanical HDDs. These have moving disks (called platters) inside, where the data itself is written and read. These traditional hard drives have largely fallen out of favor for use as system drives, but their larger capacities and much cheaper per-gigabyte cost means they are still a very popular choice for external storage use.
In recent years we have witnessed the solid-state drive revolution. These drives are basically a type of flash memory, where data is written onto chips rather than magnetic platters — that means no moving parts, which in turn means faster read/write speeds as well as (in theory) increased long-term reliability. However, these drives are typically smaller and considerably more expensive per gigabyte than HDDs; the trade-off is that they are what you’ll typically find when looking for portable external hard drives that are small enough to carry around in your pocket.
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There are also hybrid hard drives, sometimes called SSHDs. These hybrid drives are essentially HDDs that feature built-in flash storage (usually a fairly small amount) where your most-used files are stored and read, combining much of the responsiveness of SSDs with the larger storage capacity of HDDs. These could be worth the price if you need the boosted storage of an HDD but expect to actively read and write to the external drive a lot.
Are all external hard drives SSDs?
Pretty much any hard drive can be used as an external drive with an appropriate hard drive enclosure, and these are available as both SSDs and HDDs. Although SSDs are quickly replacing HDDs for use as internal system drives (the hard drive inside your PC where your operating system and other software are installed), HDDs still remain hugely popular for external use since they are much, much cheaper per gigabyte and thus give you a lot more storage capacity for your dollar.
Are external hard drives reliable?
An external hard drive is simply any HDD or SSD — just like the ones found in laptops and desktop PCs — that’s inside an external enclosure. This enclosure features some means of connecting the hard drive to your computer or another device, usually a USB port, and may also (depending on its size) have some sort of power adapter. What that means is that an external hard drive will be about as reliable as any internal hard drive so long as it comes from a reputable manufacturer. Stick with proven makers like Western Digital, Seagate, SanDisk, Samsung, and Kingston, and your data should be in safe waters.
Are external hard drives fast?
A very important thing to consider is read and write speeds (the speeds at which data is downloaded from and uploaded to the hard drive), but this is less of a potential pitfall than it was in the past. Even traditional rotary hard drives (HDDs) offer pretty solid read/write speeds today, with 7,200rpm being the standard. Be sure to double-check this and avoid any that use the older 5,400rpm standard, although these are less common now. Solid-state drives naturally offer the best read/write speeds, but, as explained above, offer the least value per gigabyte.
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Also, don’t overlook connection speeds. The fastest read/write speeds will be bottlenecked when transferring data over a connection that uses an older standard like USB 2.0. Make sure your external hard drive uses at least USB 3.0 (which is about ten times faster than USB 2.0 by comparison).
Do external hard drives need power?
Hard drives are electronic devices that need power from some external source, but that’s not to say that all external hard drives need to be plugged into a wall. Most can typically draw enough power over the same USB connection that they use for transferring data, but larger HDDs may require an external AC adapter that will come with the hard drive. This isn’t a huge problem for most but it is something to be aware of if power outlets are prime real estate where you’re going to be setting up your drive.
Looking for more great stuff? Find tech discounts and much more on our curated deals page.
One of Tesla’s biggest downsides has always been the upfront cost of its electric vehicles versus gas models. The cheapest car it currently sells is $42,490 before subsidies, and the average starting price of its 2024 models is just over $63,000.
Tesla wrote in its that it’s making “preparations” to offer new vehicles with “more affordable models.” The EV maker’s cost of goods sold per vehicle also came down to “its lowest level ever” at $35,1000.
“Plans for new vehicles, including more affordable models, remain on track for start of production in the first half of 2025,” the report reads. “These vehicles will utilize aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms and will be able to be produced on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle line-up.”
Tesla also says it plans to “begin launching” its cheaper EV models “in the first half of 2025.” That wording is still fairly loose, so there’s no guarantee that a new model will ship the same year.
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The other surprise in Tesla’s report came from the numbers. It turns out that despite setbacks like the and a federal investigation into its , Tesla had a fairly robust third quarter. The carmaker’s net income rose by 8 percent to $2.51 billion and sales rose by 2 percent year-over-year. The news also ends its four-quarter streak of .
Livewire, a marketing company, recently put out its new study that examined how the next generation of consumers expect brands to market to them. This “Next-Gen Attention Study” revealed that Gens Z and Alpha expect entirely new strategies from brands: Namely, they expect to be advertised to in-game. And not just in-game, either — they expect brands to meet them in-game authentically, with experiences. Livewire’s own platform offers insights on this “attention economy” and how brands can effectively engage with a young audience with changing needs and wants.
The study, which includes data from 1,801 gamers across the UK, U.S. and Australia, shows that 76% of Gen Alpha gamers surveyed expressed enjoyment for branded moments in game — which can include things such as custom-built worlds and experiences or cosmetics such as character skins — as opposed to 49% of millennials (54% of Gen Z gamers expressed the same enjoyment). Elsewhere in the report, 73% of Gen Alpha gamers said they preferred playable experiences over video ads, and 58% said they found immersion to be part of the enjoyment of gaming and in-game advertising.
GamesBeat spoke with Tom Simpson, Livewire’s CEO, about the changes in marketing across generations — and the disruption that the gaming era has brought: “You’ve got to show up in these gaming environments, which is sort of table stakes, isn’t it? You’ve got to put your message where the audience is. But actually that fundamental kind of communication experience and expectation changes the way that the next gen expects brands to talk to them, to engage with them, to show up for them, It’s completely different to how it been before, and just bringing your video over is not enough.”
The next generation’s expectations
Livewire recently launched in the North American market, bringing its “next-gen attention platform” to the new audience alongside Australia. Simpson said in a statement at the time of the expansion, “As we build the next-gen attention platform, we’re focused on harnessing the power of gaming to connect with Gen Z and Alpha, who are fundamentally reshaping the advertising landscape. Our approach is to create immersive, interactive experiences that capture and sustain their attention, positioning brands at the forefront of this dynamic new era.”
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The major difference that Gens Z and Alpha have over Millennials, says Simpson, is that they (and Alpha especially) expect brands to meet them where they are — and where they are is in games such as Fortnite and Roblox. Roblox recently opened its immersive ads experience to all brands, and Enrico D’Angelo, Roblox VP of economy told GamesBeat at the time that this was a great way for advertisers to connect with a “highly coveted audience like Gen Z.”
Simpson conceded that it may take some time for brands to fully understand the next-gen audience and how different they are. “Their heads are different because their heads were formed in this environment, and that because their heads were formed in this environment, the way that you got to talk to them is completely different to what to the way that you talked to them previously, and that that fundamental unit of marketing attention is being disrupted… It’s almost an expectation of the next-gen is that brands are there, and they see huge advantages in it, because brands often bring fun things for them to do.”
But while the audience is ready, Simpson notes that it’s also on games companies to work with advertisers. “Brands talk a particular language and have particular expectations. And those are things that the gaming industry, honestly, often just doesn’t understand and, historically, hasn’t cared about. But consumers are there and they want it, so you’ve got to evolve your offering… Expectations for quality of content are high. Consumers expect experiences that are amazing and inspirational and are as good as any other experience they might participate in. If you don’t make it as good as other games, they’ll go and play those other games.”
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New parental controls and insights are coming soon
Dear parent,
We’ve been working on a series of important changes that we’ll be making to your child’s account, ____________, next month.
About Roblox accounts with parent privileges
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Next month, we’re changing the way parents manage their child’s experience on Roblox by introducing Roblox accounts with parent privileges. After linking your account to your child’s, parents can view and update parental controls for their child all from their own device. Parents also get access to insights about their child’s Roblox usage, such as their daily screen time and on-platform friends.
Given these changes, starting next month, parents will no longer be able to set a parent PIN, use Account Restrictions, or receive account-related notifications to their parental email. Instead, you will need to use an account with parent privileges. Existing verified parental emails on child accounts will continue to be used for account recovery. Any settings previously set using a parent PIN will not change, but you will need an account with parent privileges to make updates going forward.
As always, if users are interested in an added layer of security on their account, you can set up 2-factor authentication.
Updated content maturity settings
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As we shared with the community in July, to help provide parents and users more clarity into the types of content available on Roblox, we’ll soon begin labeling experiences based on the type of content users can expect in an experience, rather than by age. Experience Guidelines will be renamed Content Labels, and you’ll be able to set limits on the type of content accessible to your child through the content maturity setting in parental controls.
New default settings for users under the age of 13
As part of Roblox’s commitment to safety, we are also updating certain default settings for our youngest users. Starting next month, users under the age of 13 will need parent permission to access certain chat features. Users under the age of 9 will also need parent permission to access experiences with content maturity “Moderate,” which may contain things like moderate violence or moderate crude humor.
Your child’s settings will be updated when they reach certain ages, if you and your child haven’t previously made changes to them. You and your child will be notified of these updates in advance.
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We will share more information on these setting updates when the changes go into effect next month.
Next steps
To continue receiving notifications about your child’s account related to spending or other important activity, you’ll need to set up a Roblox account with parent privileges and link to your child’s account. When these changes take effect, your child will receive a notification inviting them to add a linked parent account, and we’ll send you an email with instructions.
Since day one, Roblox has been committed to building safety features and tools into the design of our products. We will always continue to explore different ways to update our parental controls to make them even more useful for parents.
I felt like I opened a can of worms when I asked Samsung about its stance on AI photo editing at Galaxy Unpacked back in January. “There is no such thing as a real picture,” Patrick Chomet, Samsung’s Head of Customer Experience, told me at the time – a nihilism-tinged soundbite that, in fairness, came as part of a nuanced and perfectly valid philosophical commentary on the nature of photography (in the same interview, Chomet rightly talked up the importance of validating authenticity).
Marques Brownlee recently included Chomet’s quote in an X post highlighting the differing opinions of Samsung, Apple, and Google on this very subject. Still, ultimately, all of the major phone manufacturers are offering similar editing features (Magic Eraser, Clean Up, AI Eraser, and so on).
Qualcomm, for its part, acknowledges that AI photo editing is an exciting new frontier but also one fraught with awkward ethical implications. During a roundtable interview at Snapdragon Summit, the company’s Mobile Handset SVP, Chris Patrick, explained why he believes that AI photo editing “is not as simple as a real image and fake image.”
LOL “What is a photo?”Samsung: “Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture”Google: “authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond”Apple: “a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened” https://t.co/mwy3Yb9KaYSeptember 23, 2024
“It’s an interesting question, because the human brain is not digital,” the former engineer explained. “When you perceive the sunset outside, you don’t perceive the sunset absent of context. You know where you are. You know what you’re smelling. You know what you’re hearing, You know what you’re feeling. You know what a sunset looks like, right? All of that is part of how you perceive the space.”
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“So then, when we capture an image, should it just be the raw response from the sensor? Or is it right to include context in how that picture is created? I’m not an expert. I don’t have a PhD in this topic, but I do think it’s not as simple as a real image and fake image. I think context matters, and extracting the very best we can from the whole situation is an accurate reflection of what the eye and the brain do as well.”
When you perceive the sunset outside, you don’t perceive the sunset absent of context.Chris Patrick
“[However],” Patrick continued, “if there’s a picture of Rui [Guo, Honor CMO, also in attendance at the roundtable] and I on the moon, it should be very clear that that is not, in fact, a picture of Rui and I on the moon. That’s not correct – that’s manipulated.
“So, for us, it’s very clear that there has to be some mechanism to distinguish the other extreme – those manipulated images – for people. We’re building incredible technology together but we want to make sure that, in the end, it does not have a destructive impact, where people can no longer tell the difference between truth and fiction.”
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More AI is on the way
Honor CMO Ray Guo announcing the Honor Magic 7 Pro on stage at Snapdragon Summit (Image credit: Honor)
Honor CMO Rui Guo also attended the Snapdragon Summit roundtable, having just announced that the Honor Magic 7 Pro – slated for release in Europe next year – will launch with the industry’s first on-device generative AI portrait enhancement. So, is the company using AI to make portraits appear better than they actually are? Or is the aim to mimic real-life details that Honor’s hardware can’t capture on its own?
“On the one hand,” Guo explained, “we have to make sure that the photo itself is good by modern consumer standards. Everyone knows what [constitutes] a good and bad photo. But on the other hand, we definitely want to retain the authenticity of the photo. We’re not trying to Photoshop the photo for the consumer, right? We should give the authority to the users at end of the day.”
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter. Tools like Magic Eraser and Clean Up become ethically dubious when users – or, more worryingly, politicians – attempt to pass tampered images off as real, but as a means of occasionally removing strangers from family vacation photos, AI photo editing is, for many people, undeniably useful.
Neither Qualcomm nor Honor is forcing these tools onto their consumers – if you want to take a photo in the same way as you always have done, you still can. Rather, companies are giving users the freedom to choose how to capture moments that matter to them. Sure, it’s a can of worms, but as Qualcomm’s Chris Patrick noted, “it’s not as simple as real image and fake image.”
GenAI is plain vanilla, if you ask the folks at Google India. As the tech behemoth rolled out its ambitious ‘Google for India’ repertoire for their biggest and fastest growing market, there was one familar focus area where further announcements predictably came – Google’s onboarding of Indian languages as a digital tool. And, of course, artificial intelligence (AI) and lots of it.
Well in verse with the parent company’s efforts to take the pole position in AI advancements and grab the thunder back from that petulant upstart called OpenAI is evidently a dream up there on Mountain View (where Google’s global HQ is), and the trickle down effect was well evident in many of the announcements in India on Thursday – Google’s Gemini AI can now go ‘Live’, with real time conversation by adapting to the user. The ‘Gemini Live’ feature is available in 8 Indian languages, besides English.
Google’s next-generation AI project called Astra is at the core of it, and while it is awaited, the slow rollout of its features, the company hopes, will be transformational. For now, there is already AI Overviews expected in Telugu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi in the coming days, while ‘ask with video’ feature in Search also debuted, starting with English.
With image-based search on Maps, Gemini summarising Google reviews to save time, real-time weather and traffic updates on Maps, Google’s attempt is to make AI work for daily chores, beside the focus on Indian languages to take its tech evangelism to the hinterland.
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Another path-breaking endeavour has been in the field of healthcare. Not only is the company tying up with the government’s Ayushman Bharat project to roll out the issuance of the ABHA health ID through Google wallets soon, its iCALL feature whereby a user can call and speak to a health professional live has been expanded to more vernacular languages. And perhaps incredibly, its AI tools are now evolved enough to detect eye issues, TB and even cancer. For instance, TB could apparently be detected through just an audio sample analysis of a person’s sound!
Google also announced a spate of partnerships, right from Adani and CleanMax (for clean energy projects) to Muthoot (for online loan-against-gold) to Glance (skilling).
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are some of the best periods to snag yourself a new smartwatch, especially if you’ve been waiting a while before upgrading. While the actual sales day might be a little while off, there are already a lot of great early Black Friday deals that you can take advantage of, including on some of the best smartwatches on the market. To that end, we’ve collected some of our favorite early deals for you below, although it’s also worth keeping an eye on our larger smartwatch deals roundup as well.
While most smartwatches focus on the smartwatch part, the Garmin Forerunner 55 is made for runners who want to keep track of their overall fitness and their runs. It comes with GPS tracking in the three major systems, has a whole suite of sensors such as heart rate and Vo2 Max, and comes with a very solid $30 discount off the $200 price tag.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic is easily one of the best Android phones on the market. In fact, when our senior mobile writer Andy Boxall got his hands on it, he felt that “the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic has superb styling, all-day comfort, comprehensive health tracking, and more. It’s the smartwatch to buy for your Android phone.” Even better, this deal lets you snag it for a substantial 33% discount.
For those who are in the Apple ecosystem, the Apple Watch Series 9 is probably one of the best and most affordable options, even more so with this impressive $100 discount. The conclusion our senior mobile writer came to when reviewing it was “The Apple Watch Series 9’s 24/7 comfort, extensive features, fast performance, and seamless integration with the iPhone make it a must-buy.”
If you’re just as interested in tracking your fitness as having a smartwatch, the Garmin Venu 3S GPS does a great job of balancing both, and since it comes from Garmin, you know that fitness tracking is top notch. Between the GPS coverage, Sleep Coach and Body Battery, you’ll have all the stats you need to refine your fitness journey, plus the $50 discount isn’t too bad either!
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem and truly want the best experience money can buy, then you’ll want this Apple Watch Ultra 2 GPS deal that knocks $119 off the price tag. Our senior mobile reviewer feels that it has “an outstanding design, great software, and some very welcome upgrades, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is tough to beat.”
There are a lot of options out there for smartwatches, but for the most part, there are generally three big players on the market: Apple, Samsung, and Garmin. Apple Watches are made specifically for the Apple ecosystem, and if you’re in it, then you’ll want to go with one of those, with your main options being the Watch Series 9 for a good budget-friendly option, the Ultra Watch 2 for the best, and the Series 10 for something in the middle. We actually have a great breakdown of the Apple Watch Series 9 vs. Ultra 2, so be sure to check that out before taking the plunge.
On the other hand, Samsung is the go-to smartwatch maker for Android, and it generally has two options every generation: a standard model and a pro or classic model with a bezel that you can turn to control the watch. Samsung does have a high-end option in the form of the Galaxy Watch Ultra, but it borrows, almost to a comical extent, from the Apple Watch Ultra.
Finally, Garmin is the brand you go for if you want something more about fitness tracking than a smartwatch. It has a wide range of products, but the Forerunner lineup is great for runners, while the Venu is a great option for those who want a good balance between smartwatch and fitness tracker.
With many decades of combined experience as reviewers and deal hunters, we have a very good sense of what watches offer the best offers and prices. Of course, we don’t just rely on our own instincts, but we also put in a lot of legwork to make sure you’re getting the best deals you can for any single smartwatch we put up here. We also have our own set of tools that we can fall back on to look at things such as historical pricing. When you put all that together, you get suggestions that offer you the best bang for your buck so that you can buy with confidence.
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