I’ve tested dozens of hard drives: this $104 portable 5TB drive is the best value external HDD in early Amazon Prime Day 2023 sales

When preparing for our Prime Day Portable HDD deal page, I researched all the portable hard disk drive on Amazon to look for the best value-for-money one.

There are no cheaper portable HDD, on a per GB basis, at Amazon at the time of writing. This 5TB Seagate Expansion Portable sells for a mere $103.86, bringing it tantalizing close to the $20 barrier*. You won’t find a brand new, cheaper 5TB model from a recognized vendor.

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

We’d recommend buying the additional 2-year warranty (3-year data recovery plan) from Amazon for $14.99 which includes free shipping for in–lab data recovery and if your data is not recovered, you will get your  money back.

I have not reviewed this particular model but a similar one (likely to have used the same components) back in … 2019.  5TB is the maximum capacity of portable hard drives** and likely to stay like that forever. SSD prices are falling fast (you can get a 4TB SSD for about $200) 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.