Best 5 storage devices

There are three types of consumer-grade computer storage: internal, external, and network attached. Internal storage is generally a hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD), which is also the core of most other types of storage. The computer you have at home has at least one hard drive (or SSD) to hold its operating system, applications, and data. Some computers have multiple hard drives or SDDs to extend their storage capacities.

As you can install only so many drives internally due to limited physical space, power supply, and internal ports, there will come a time when you'll need some external storage, such as the kind that connects to a computer via a USB, FireWire, or eSATA port. (There are also other types of external storage, like zip drives and so on, but they are generally obsolete and are no longer reviewed by CNET.) These external storage devices are also great tools to share data between computers. The one problem with them is that they can be used with only one computer at a time.

When you want to share data between multiple computers simultaneously, the best solution is a network-attached storage (NAS) device. Unlike an external hard drive, a NAS gets connected directly to a router or a hub and is therefore available to all computers within the network at any given time.

The five devices on this page represent our favorites across categories for their ease of use, smart design, useful feature set, low cost per gigabyte, fast throughput speeds, or some or all of the above. This page is updated regularly as more devices are reviewed.