The best hard drive for your TV: Buying guide in 2023

If you want a hard drive to watch movies on television or to record your favorite program, you should take several details into account before launching to buy the cheapest from Hafeez Centre Lahore Online Store or the latest SSD-type model.

You don’t need the maximum speed and performance to play the last series you downloaded in 4K. My recommendation is to buy a good external HDD like the WD My Passport from Hafeez Centre Lahore, which works just as well and is much cheaper. If you want to go deeper, in this guide we will tell you everything you need to know when connecting an external hard drive to the TV. 

 What is the best hard drive for my TV?

The best one for you will depend on your needs and budget, but it should at least meet the following points:

Be compatible with your television so that it can read most video file formats.

Have at least a USB 3.0 interface (now called “USB 3.2 Gen 1” or “SuperSpeed USB”).

The drives in the comparison above all meet these basic requirements. Below we analyze them and show other characteristics such as capacity, security, etc.

Can I use the drive to watch movies on TV?

Of course. Watching movies or series on TV is one of the most common uses of external hard drives. However, you have to take into account some details that can prevent you from viewing your content on television, and they are exactly what we will tell you next.

To view video files saved on an external device, you will need an application installed on the TV (or equivalent software if it is not a Smart TV) that is capable of accessing the content and playing it. The normal thing is that the television already comes with a default functionality to play content (whether it is an app or not), but if you have a smart television you can access the application store and download the one you like the most.

4k movie playback

Several factors influence the ability to play the 4K movies on your external hard drive on a TV. In addition to having a good 4k multimedia hard drive, you should take these factors into account. Below we explain what they are.

You must have the movie saved on a hard drive with sufficient reading speed to play movies in this format. The HDDs in use (and of course the SSDs) usually have transfer rates to spare for these tasks. In any case, if you want to make sure that the disc can play your movie in 4k, you can download the simple MediaArea software program and check its bitrate in the “First video track” section.

In the following photo, MediaInfo shows that our 51-gig The Lion King 4K movie requires a device capable of reading at 54.3 Mbit/s, that is, at 6.7 MByte/s (the result of dividing 54.3 by 8). In the analysis of the Toshiba Canvio HDD, we see that its read/write rate is 625 MByte/s, much higher than 6.7 MByte/s, with which this disk would be more than capable of playing this movie.

Which hard drive to choose to record TV

It should be clarified that not all the content you see on your television will be able to be recorded on your external hard drive. The decoders of the main television operators (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange, etc.) already have a recording function and it is only in their internal memory (or in the cloud) that you can save the broadcasts.

Once it has been clarified that you will only be able to record the broadcasts of your television’s DTT tuner on the hard drive, make sure that the device you connect to the TV is compatible with content recording and that, naturally, your TV has a recording function.

Most 1TB external hard drives sold today are capable of recording TV content. If you can connect the disk to the TV (normally both devices are connected via USB), the normal thing is that the disk is capable of recording content.

Regarding the compatibility of your television with the recording of content, if you do not have the manual of your television available to verify the existence of this functionality, a quick test that your television is suitable is the existence of the typical circular button on the control red recording (or one that says “rec”, “record” or similar).

Conclusions

At a time when the price and number of movie platforms and streaming series are still too high, it is always a good idea to have an external hard drive to play movies or series that you have downloaded on television.

Fortunately, television manufacturers are aware of this fact and make it easy to connect storage devices to play multimedia content effortlessly.

Practically all televisions incorporate the necessary USB ports where we can connect our disks, and compatibility with almost all of them is guaranteed. However, pay attention to the television’s ability to play certain content, for example, movies in 4K resolution or videos encoded in unsupported formats.