WD 20TB My Book Duo Desktop HDD USB 3.1 Gen 1 with software for device management, backup and password protection USB-C and USB-A cables RAID 0/1, JBOD

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To calculate the average price, we add up the cheapest daily prices of the last 90 days and divide by 90. In a nutshell, it is a storage device that contains an internal hard drive. The fact that there's two types of hard drives - 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch - means that there are also two types of external hard drives: larger desktop hard drives and smaller portable hard drives. The WD My Book Duo (2017 edition) is certainly a class act that combines new styling with excellent performance and potentially massive capacities.

The drive is a shade expensive, and the integrated carrying loop is too big to easily fit on a standard keychain.Otherwise, this is an excellent storage device that's ideal for heavy everyday use. Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority are available from us on request.If you deal with any sensible information leaving it in an unencrypted drive is risky. While encryption can be done in software with a high degree of fine-tuning, nothing beats a purely hardware-based solution that frees you from the software-configuration complexities. The new My Book Duo has diverged in one major way from the previous designs; the rather lame ‘Book’ analogy has finally been terminated. The only case with hard drives where the USB standard matters much is if you connect a drive to an old-style, low-bandwidth USB 2.0 port, which is better reserved for items like keyboards and mice. (Also, if it's a portable drive, that USB 2.0 port may not supply sufficient power to run the drive in the first place, so the speed shortfall may be moot.) Any remotely recent computer will have some faster USB 3-class ports, though. Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.

Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. The storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.) While buying an external hard drive for your needs, you need to ensure that you are getting a device that helps to store your data safely. The most important thing to consider is its reliability, as you don’t like to buy an external hard drive which fails on you and causes you to lose all your important data. If a drive’s looks matter to you, you’ll definitely have choices. Manufacturers these days frequently market portable drives as fashion accessories, selling them in various sizes, shapes, and colors. How we test external hard drivesIncidentally, you can also set the unit to JBOD (which stands for ‘just a bunch of drives’), where each drive becomes a single volume/logical drive. We’re not sure why you might want to go this route, as it offers no redundancy against drive failure (like mirroring) or performance benefits (striping). But anyway, the option is there. The two biggest hard disk drive vendors have released 22TB hard drives with Western Digital unveiling a 26TB model in 2022 (although you won't be able to buy it as it is a data center only product). Toshiba has a 20TB CMR Hard disk drive but no plans for a 22TB one yet. This is a great choice to consider as an external drive for Mac and external hard drives full stops. It works differently than standard external hard drives, and you can plug it straight into the router to get a direct internet connection. You can share files to and from your devices via Wi-Fi, and it also means that you can get your data at any time from anywhere, and you don’t need to leave a specific computer on to access your data.