Hard drives: 25 best deals in the UK for April 2014

There's never a better time to buy storage. Be it external storage to backup your archive, internal storage for your games and files or SSD to boost your computer speed, they have never been cheaper and prices are so low that they now rival that of blank optical disks like Blu-ray or DVD.

Desktop hard drives

There are two types of external hard disk drives, those powered by USB and those that need a separate adaptor. The latter is known as the external desktop drive, is usually cheaper per gigabyte but also way bulkier. The flip side is that they carry significantly higher capacities compared to their smaller counterparts, reaching 6TB per drive compared to 2TB for the USB-powered ones.

Transcend 1TB 2.5 inch USB 3.0 Military-Grade Shock Resistant Portable External Hard Drive | £51.99 | Amazon

WD Elements Portable Hard Drive 1TB Black | £49.99 | PC World

Samsung M3 Slimline 1.5TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive | £49.99 | Amazon

Toshiba 1TB Stor.E Basics USB 3.0 2.5-inch External Hard Drive | £47.98 | Amazon

Seagate Expansion 1TB Mobile External Hard Drive | £47.96 | CCL Online

WD My Passport Ultra 2TB USB 3.0 Portable Drive with Auto and Cloud Backup | £85.99 | Amazon

WD My Passport Ultra Slim 1TB Blue | £55 | PC World

Hitachi Touro Mobile MX3 500GB Mobile External | £34.94 | CCL Online

Portable hard drives

These are becoming increasingly more popular thanks to a dramatic change in the computing landscape. Portable external hard disk drives in general use smaller laptop drives. Shipments of so-called 2.5-inch hard disk drives, which are more compact than their desktop cousins, have been significantly going up due to strong demand and ample supply, which has caused the price difference between 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives to shrink.

WD My Book 3 TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive | £90.99 | Amazon

Samsung 2TB D3 Station External Hard Drive | £58.98 | Ebuyer

LACIE Porsche Design P'9233 external hard drive - 2 TB | £94.07 | Pixmania

4TB Touro DX3 Desktop Hard Drive | £105.99 | Ebuyer

Seagate 2TB Expansion USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive - Black | £57.97 | Amazon

WD 4TB My Cloud Personal Cloud Storage | £159 | Amazon

SSD drives

The average price of SSD, which can be either internal or external, has been falling down significantly since the beginning of the year as new products pushed mature ones off the shelves and caused retailers to discount them down to about 33p per GB, the lowest SSD storage has ever been. It is still however about 10x more than what you'd pay for traditional hard disk drive storage.

HyperX 120GB SATA3 3K 2.5-inch Gaming SSD Drive | £55.99 | Amazon

Kingston Technology 240GB Solid State Drive | £80.99 | Amazon

Samsung 840 EVO 500GB 2.5-inch Basic SATA Solid State Drive | £182 | Amazon

Seagate 600 Series 480GB 2.5inch SATA-III SSD | £159.99 | Ebuyer

Internal hard drives

Surprisingly enough, you might be better off buying external hard disk drives and taking out the disks to use internally. This is one of the quirks of demand and supply. As consumers move away from desktop PCs to tablets, laptops and other devices that are not traditionally upgradable, the demand for internal hard drives fell. Still, they tend to be the ones with the cheapest cost per GB and have the highest capacities around.

Toshiba 2TB Internal Hard Drive 7200RPM | £56.46 | Ebuyer

Samsung SpinPoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB SATA II 3.5" | £37.62 | CCL Online

WD 1TB Internal SATA Hard Drive | £41.57 | Amazon

Seagate ST1000DX001 3.5 inch 1TB Hybrid Internal Solid State Drive | £59.98 | Amazon

2014 could well be the year when storage suddenly becomes more interesting thanks to a number of new technologies like SMR or helium-fillled. That in turn will bring down the cost of storage for end users.

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