Best External Hard Drives 2017 -10 Best Portable Drives Reviewed. Remember the days when the only ability to have storage inside your PC was by hooking up an internal storage device commonly known has hard disk or hard disk drive? That was the storage standard for quite some time, and other than that, there was absolutely no way of having your storage outside your computer. Then came those USB flash drives that allowed you to carry small amount of data whenever you wanted to. However, when compared to actual, full sized hard drives, these USB drives didn’t really have enough storage and were often quite expensive. With that out of the way, things have drastically changed in the modern day and age, hard drives are quickly being replaced by SSDs (solid state drives) and while USB drives are still relevant, they have a direct opponent known as the external drive. These external hard drive are powered using the USB cables, however, they have storage that can easily equal the storage that i...