
Get an SSD if you want a drive that has extra protection against getting knocked around, and if you need speed. Durability: Hard drives contain physical moving parts, so they’re more prone to failure due to jostling or drops than solid state drives, which have no mechanical parts.

The best way to protect your files from being lost in a hard drive failure is to double up with a cloud backup service. We’ve also analyzed Backblaze’s hard drive failure reports, which have their own shortcomings.

It’s difficult to get metrics on which hard drive models are more reliable over the long run, and though we’ve examined Amazon reviews to establish which drives have died more quickly for owners, there will always be outliers and failures that occur sooner than expected. If possible, try to replace your backup drives between the third and sixth years of use.

Performance: We evaluate each drive with tests that replicate different real-world uses.We dismiss drives built exclusively for Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 because they cost too much and don’t perform noticeably better for most people. Input: We consider drives with a variety of USB port types-USB Type-B, Micro-B, or Type-C-but regardless of the port, we look at only those drives that support the most current USB standard, USB 3.2 Gen 2.
