Largest Capacity External Hard Drive

Here's the world's largest external hard disk drive - and it's super secure

(Image credit: Aegis)

It's only been a few days since we reviewed the Seagate IronWolf Pro, the world's first 18TB internal hard drive, which also proved to be one of the fastest HDDs we've ever tested.

Now Apricorn has taken an unknown 18TB hard disk drive and dropped it into an external enclosure, creating the world's largest external hard disk drive on sale right now.

You can, of course, get your own drive and put it in an external chassis, but that's not the point.

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The Aegis Padlock DT FIPS is not your standard drive. It offers software-free, 100% hardware-based 256-bit AES XTS encryption, with an onboard keypad PIN (rather than a fingerprint reader) and ultra-fast USB 3.2 data transfer speeds.

All the data is encrypted on the fly (and at rest) and remains on the device itself - and that includes the PIN. The drive is completely cross-platform compatible and agnostic by nature, making it a great external HDD for Mac too.

But the most important quality, perhaps, is that it cannot be tampered with easily, as the internal components are protected with a layer of hardened epoxy and the proprietary firmware - Aegisware - is locked down to prevent any possible malware attacks.

How much does it cost? A cool $1,199 (about £957/ AU$1679) with free delivery in the US, including a three-year warranty, which is about twice what you can expect to pay for the bare 18TB hard drive.

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Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website building and web hosting when DHTML and frames were en vogue and started writing about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium. Then followed a weekly tech column in a local business magazine in Mauritius, a late night tech radio programme called Clicplus and a freelancing gig at the now-defunct, Theinquirer, with the legendary Mike Magee as mentor. Following an eight-year stint at ITProPortal.com where he discovered the joys of global techfests, Désiré now heads up TechRadar Pro. He has an affinity for anything hardware and staunchly refuses to stop writing reviews of obscure products or cover niche B2B software-as-a-service providers.