Best external hard drives & SSDs for Chromebox 2023

Chromeboxes aren't laptops. You're not tossing one into a backpack and setting it up at Starbucks. Instead, it sits quietly behind a screen of some sort and is always ready. That means there's no reason to try and get by with 16 or 32GB of storage. Most models are easy to take apart and upgrade if you're the DIY type, but adding more storage is as easy as plugging in a cable. These are the best external hard drives and SSDs for your Chromebox.

Adding extra storage to a Chromebox is easy

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Chromeboxes make great computers for plenty of people. In households with kids, they're the perfect desktop computer for homework and attached to your TV, they bring the internet and everything that comes with it to your big screen.

Connecting an external drive to your Chromebox is easy, thanks to Chrome OS working well with a lot of file systems. Most external drives these days will basically be plug and play, which makes them easy and convenient for anyone to set up and use. Your best value comes from the WD My Passport, which gets you 1TB of storage for roughly $50.

Another option is to use a drive enclosure that lets you dock an internal drive and use it to connect to your Chromebox via USB. For internal drives, we'll recommend the Samsung Evo 870 SSD, which is one of the best-selling drives around and also a good option if you've got a laptop or PC that could use a storage upgrade.

Jerry Hildenbrand
Senior Editor — Google Ecosystem

Jerry is an amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic. There's nothing he can't take apart, but many things he can't reassemble. You'll find him writing and speaking his loud opinion on Android Central and occasionally on Twitter.