I've tested dozens of portable hard drives — this is the cheapest external HDD worth buying on Black Friday

(Image credit: wd easystore 5TB portable hard drive)

When updating for our Black Friday SSD and HDD page, I researched all the portable hard disk drives on Amazon and Best Buy, looking for the best value-for-money model.

There are no cheaper portable HDD, on a per GB basis, than this model from Best Buy at the time of writing. Exclusive to the US retailer, this 5TB WD EasyStore sells for a mere $99.99, bringing it just under the $20 barrier. You won’t find a brand new, cheaper 5TB model from a recognized vendor right now.

It embraces a conservative design with a functional but now-obsolete flat USB connector (no Type-C here sadly). You get a 2-year warranty (shorter than expected) and lacks something similar to Seagate’s Rescue Data Security services which can come handy if your hard drive is damaged and you want to recover the data on it.

Unlike Amazon, Best Buy doesn't have a data recovery protection plan. Amazon's one offers - for a fee - to get free shipping for in–lab data recovery and if your data is not recovered, you will get your money back.

Note that there is a WD Backup and WD Drive Utilities software which can come handy for regularly backing up your content.

I have not reviewed this particular model but a similar one (likely to have used the same components) back in 2021. 5TB is the maximum capacity of portable hard drives and likely to stay like that. SSD prices are falling fast (you can get a 4TB SSD for about $100) but still too high to compete with hard drives above 1TB capacity.

External hard drives have been cheaper in the past; one of my colleagues managed to track one down for $90 two years ago but since then, inflation and the component supply crunch, have sent prices in an upward spiral.

Portable hard drives are different from external hard drives (otherwise known as desktop hard drives). Both of them live outside the computer (or laptop) but differ in physical size. The former has a width of 70mm while the latter has a width of around 100mm. Portable hard drives no longer get improvements in capacity and is likely to disappear in a few years as SSD reach price parity.

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.