HWM+HardwareZone.com Tech Awards 2016: Editor's Choice - Part 2

Best Portable External HDD

Best Portable External HDD

Thanks to rapidly falling prices of flash memory, SSDs are steadily replacing mechanical spinning hard disk drives as the weapon of choice for OEMs and many DIY system builders. However, hard disk drives are still the go-to choice for consumers when it comes to backups and transferring large files between machines. And to entice consumers, hard disk drives are only getting bigger and larger in capacity. 2015 saw hard drive manufacturers cramming 3TB and later 4TB into a single 2.5 form factor drives, which is certainly impressive, and exceeds what any consumer SSD can offer. To make cut for this year’s awards, the drive must be released in the past year and must offer at least 3TB of storage.

Nominees:
 

• Seagate Backup Plus 4TB
• Western Digital My Passport Ultra 3TB 

And the winner is...

The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 3TB offers less capacity than its rival, and also costs more per gigabyte. However, it redeems itself in a few key areas. First of all, its offered in a variety of colors, but more importantly, it has better performance. That’s not all, it comes with a variety of bundled apps that adds more functionality. The WD Backup app lets users easily schedule, program and perform backups; while the WD Utilities app is useful for monitoring the drive’s status and run tests to detect bad sectors and drive failures. Most useful of all is the WD Security app which password protects the drive and provides hardware 256-bit AES encryption. Its superior performance and better features makes it the winner here.

For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed at the References section at the end.