We know how important it is to find and use the best external hard drives for photographers. Our team has been running photography businesses for decades and have consistently had to rely on good external hard drives to store our client’s images. 

While the average hobbyist or person with a home computer might need an external hard drive for their personal projects (and many on this list will be good for that type of use), professional photographers have added requirements that will make them want to vet the products they use even more for quality and performance. 

In this post, we’re going to dive into the key things you should look for in an external hard drive (to help you vet them for yourself), and share some of our favorite external HDD’s for photographers to use. 

What to look for in an external hard drive as a photographer?

We don’t need to get too into the weeds of tech specs, but do want to cover some of the most crucial things you’ll want to keep your eyes open for when looking to buy an external hard drive to store your photos. 

Compatible with your operating system (Mac vs Windows)

Many external hard drives come pre-formatted for a specific operating system. In many cases, you can reformat it to work with another platform, but this can be a little confusing (especially if you aren’t tech savvy), so sometimes buying one that works with your computer right out of the box can be a good option. 

Amount of storage

Storage is the most obvious thing to look out for, but it’s valuable to keep in mind just how much you anticipate needing…and buying more than enough. 

The average uncompressed, RAW image file is around ~20MB (megabytes). If you’re a wedding photographer and take around 4,000 images per wedding, you’re going to need about 80GBs (gigabytes) of space per wedding. If you’re shooting around 30 weddings a year, you’re going to need about 3TBs (terabytes) to store just a years’ worth of wedding files. 

Wedding and event photographers tend to need much more storage space than average because of the volume of images. Portrait, landscape and other types of photographers may require less – but make sure you calculate how much you need before buying. 

Transfer speeds

One quality of a good external hard drive is for it to be fast and efficient to upload images to, and take images off of. A measure of this is the transfer speed. While transfer speed can be influenced by factors beyond the drive itself (such as the type of USB connectors you have), your external hard drive should be rated to at least handle up to 480 Mbits/sec (USB 2.0).

If you’re computer has the functionality, we suggest getting an external hard drive with USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt connections for the fastest speeds. Most newer computers include these as the standard.

Product performance and longevity

These are qualities that make a great product and can only really be identified by reading reviews. We particularly like combing through user reviews to read feedback from people who have used these products for an extended period of time. You can typically trust a high star rating. All of the drives we’ve included in this list have 4+ stars on all the major platforms and reviews by hundreds of customers. 

Compatible USB connection with your computer

We mentioned your USB connection impacting speeds but want to reiterate that you will want to make sure your choice will be compatible with your computer. (If it isn’t, you can always buy a cheap dongle to get it to work, but this will hamper your speeds). 

Hard drive power source

Some external HDs are powered by your computer, and others by battery or by being plugged into a wall outlet. You will want to make sure you understand how yours will be powered as it may impact your office set up or ability to use on the go. 

Best External Hard Drives for Photographers – Standard Hard Drives

Now, we’re going to dive into our recommendations for the best external hard drives for photographers. In this first section, we’re going to highlight “standard” hard drives. These are the typical hard drives you probably think of when you think of buying a hard drive, and tend to work well for most photography storage uses. 

1). SanDisk Professional G-Drive Pro

The G-Drive is one of our favorite external hard drives for photographers. We have used these for years and they have remained a consistent method for backing up our client images quickly and efficiently. 

2). LaCie Rugged Mini External Hard Drive

The LaCie Rugged mini is an external hard drive we recommend for photographers, especially if you are regularly on the go. The casing is designed very well to deal with any potential damage that you might incur while traveling. 

3). Seagate Desktop External Hard Drive HDD

The Seagate Desktop external hard drive is a larger storage capacity drive best suited for remaining in a single place (such as your office). They offer options ranging between 4TB and 20TB of storage. It requires a USB 3.0 port on your computer to be compatible. 

4). WD Elements Desktop External Hard Drive

WD Elements is a “classic” external hard drive, and probably one of the most recognizable to the average consumer. This is another great buy for photographers planning to offload a lot of files into storage with storage options up to 20TB. 

5). Fantom Drives Extreme External Hard Drive SSD

This external hard drive is very compact and fast – running on USB-C, Thunderbolt 3 and 4. If you need a small device, this is a great choice. 

6). Toshiba Canvio Advance Portable External Hard Drive

This is a surprisingly affordable external hard drive for photographers who don’t want any fuss. This line only goes up to 4TB, but that may be most suitable for portrait photographers (or photographers just wanting about a years worth of storage). 

One nice thing from an aesthetic point of view is that they do offer these in different styles and colors. That doesn’t matter (too much), but is a fun thing if you like well designed and complimentary work space (we sure do!). 

7). WD My Passport Portable External Hard Drive

Western Digital here again with another great external hard drive. The My Passport is a drive that can be easily removed from your computer and taken with you on the go. We have used these drives before particularly during a time where we were often working at some coffee shops, a simple storage solution!

8). Samsung T7 Shield Portable Solid State Drive

The Samsung T7 external hard drive is specifically marketing towards photographers, and for good reason. Not only is it fast and modern, but it has some unique features including drop resistance, water and dust resistance, and small dimensions for a fairly large storage size. An upgraded model (the T7 Touch) has all the same features as well as a fingerprint sensor for private access, which may be great for photographers concerned about client privacy. 

9). SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD

As photographers, you may already be used to and comfortable with SanDisk for your SD cards (we’ve always been a fan of SanDisk Extremes for covering weddings reliably). You can take that trust with you to their line of external hard drives including this great selection – the SanDisk Professional G-RAID 2 Desktop Drive. 

This drive has everything you would expect from a modern external HD for a photographer. You can also get a cheap carrying case for extra protection if that’s your style.

10). Seagate Backup Plus Hub External Hard Drive

The Seagate Backup Plus Hub is an external hard drive that is no frills, but does its job well with good performance speeds, great reviews from other buyers, and a large storage capacity for multiple years worth of gigs. 

Best External Hard Drives for Photographers – RAID Hard Drives

In this category of external hard drives for photographers, we’re going to take a look at a few redundant array of independent disks (or RAID) drives. To simplify what these are – picture having your images backed up to multiple hard drives at once, and if one would happen to fail (which can happen – even with the most reliable products), your images are still backed up on another. RAID drives solve this by enabling multiple backups. 

You can refer to the RAID levels to see how many hard drive slots are included in the device – higher levels provide more backups.

A note of warning – RAID drives can be a little pricier because you are getting more storage solutions. In most cases, you will need to buy the actual hard drive disks separately and install them yourself (a very easy process). 

11). SanDisk Professional G-RAID 2 Desktop Drive

This SanDisk RAID drive has a RAID rating of 2 (includes space for 2 hard drives). Like the G-Drive we mentioned earlier in this post, this is a great in a line of premium products and would serve a photographer well with multiple hard drives worth of backups. This one is on our list for when we need more storage space for our businesses.

12). LaCie 2big RAID External Hard Drive Desktop HDD

This Lacie 2big RAID drive is another great solution that includes space for 2 hard drives. This is a sizeable machine with a massive storage capacity – you could fit several years of work on here, backed up twice. 

13). WD My Book Duo Desktop RAID External Hard Drive

Building on the WD hard drives we’ve already covered, the My Book Due Desktop RAID is another high capacity solution that also enables multiple backups that photographers can easily benefit from. This is a great option. 

14). MiniPro Dura RAID Portable Rugged Hard Drive

Finally, the MiniPro Dura is a RAID option that is also smaller in size and easy to transport. This was an easy selling point for photographers on move, especially given that most RAID systems are heftier and designed to stay in a single location. 

Best External Hard Drives for Photographers – NAS Storage Systems

Network attached storage (or NAS) drives are great because they take the idea of an external hard drive and RAID drive, and build on it by giving you the ability to access the drive remotely. 

NAS systems can be configured to access remotely or over wi-fi, instead of being synced to just one device like standard hard drives.

This might seem like overkill, but it’s a great solution for professional photography studios that outsource work and need to transfer RAW files across multiple people. 

15). Buffalo TeraStation 3420DN 4-Bay Desktop NAS

If you are looking for an external hard drive that will be with you throughout the years, the Buffalo TeraStation is a great example of a 4-bay desktop NAS system. With 4 hard drive bays, you can load up a ton of storage space in this thing for immediate access while you work. Gone are the days of needing to swap between hard drives as the years go on. 

16). Synology 2 Bay NAS DiskStation DS220+

For photographers wanting to explore more cost-effective NAS storage, the Synology 2 bay is a great introduction. With two hard drive slots, you can have the safe storage method you want, while also expanding your ability to connect to your drive via your network. 

17). QNAP TS-253D-4G 2 Bay NAS for Professionals

Similar to the product above, the QNAP NAS offers many similar qualities. The difference between these two is fairly negligible. 

18). WD My Cloud Pro Series PR4100 NAS

The WD My Cloud Pro Series is a line of NAS storage that ranges from 8TB to 72TB. It’s design is really intended for people with massive file libraries needing to be centralized. The larger hard drives would uniquely be best used by photography studios with multiple photographers taking on many gigs throughout the year, and needing to maximize not just storage space but efficiency to connect with each other and share files.

Cloud Storage Solutions for Photographers – Alternatives to External Hard Drives

Finally, we want to close out this article by looking at some cloud storage solutions for photographers. What better external hard drives exist for photographers than those completely off site, but accessible to you from anywhere? 

We like cloud storage solutions because they help address one of the biggest concerns for professional photographers storing client images – what happens if the worst happened and my drives fail (or I lose my drive in a robbery or house burning down?). 

19). BackBlaze

BackBlaze serves as a way to back up your entire computer (if you want it to) in regular intervals. You can configure it to do this automatically, keeping cloud copies of your images as a backup of your backups. 

20). WeTransfer

WeTransfer is a great cloud storage solution that is particularly useful for transferring images across different computers or networks. In the world of photography, this would apply best to transferring and storing images from 2^nd shooters and associate photographers.

21). Icedrive

Icedrive is our final recommendation that is functionally a competitor to Dropbox, but works much better (in our experience). While you are limited by your internet service providers upload/download speeds, the platform works very well especially for lower volume photography studios and hobbyists. 

How to Use Your External Hard Drives as a Photographer

Now that you’ve selected an external hard drive, it’s time to make an image backup storage plan. 

Our recommendation below will make it so that the risk of losing any of your client images will be so low, it’s borderline impossible to happen. 

We recommend every photographer has at least:

• 2 physical external hard drives storing the images
• 1 SD card for physical storage of the images on another device
• 1 backup on a cloud server

This provides you with 4 storage backups in both physical media format (easy and quick to access to work with) and on the cloud (off site, not dependent on your ability to care for the drive in your home or office). Should 1 or 2 of these devices fail for any reason, you’ll still have backups ready to work with. 

Once you’ve completed work for a client’s project, we recommend retaining at least 1 physical backup and 1 backup on a cloud server. This is for long term storage, and so you can refer to the images if you ever need to in the future. 

References:

• https://www.harddriverecovery.org/raid/array-issues/raid-vs-nas-differentiating-these-two-data-storage-technologies/#:~:text=Between%20the%20two%2C%20NAS%20can,pretty%20expensive%20to%20use%20RAID.
• https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/how-fast-should-an-external-drive-be-172213en/