If possible, try to replace your backup drives between the third and sixth years of use. Reliability: All hard drives die eventually, but there’s no definitive answer on when that day will come.Many desktop hard drives are available in capacities of 14 TB or more, but most people don’t need that much storage. Capacity: We focus on 4 TB and 5 TB hard drives because of the balance they strike between value and total cost.Price: Although we consider drives of all prices, we limit our testing to models priced below $150, and we compare their value on a dollar-per-terabyte basis.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.
