External Hard Drives From Kjell Company
Kjell Company is the Norwegian and Swedish electronics retailer formerly tied to CompuGroup. Their in-house branded drives are rebranded units from established OEM manufacturers, mostly Chinese brands like Seagate, Western Digital, or Transcend depending on what batch they're running that quarter. The drives work fine for basic backup and archiving. They are not designed for anything professional-grade. I have bought three of them over the years and used them for different setups, so here is what actually happens. Before buying anything, you need to figure out whether you are storing photos, video files, or working archives. A 2TB drive for family photos will last you a decade with zero issues. A 2TB drive for 4K video editing is going to be frustrating. The read and write speeds on these units typically top out around 120 to 150 megabytes per second for sustained transfers. That is because they are using 2.5 inch mechanical platters inside a USB enclosure, not SSD technology. If you need faster throughput, look at their SSD line instead. The spinning drives are cheaper and fine for cold storage, but they are slow by modern standards. I had a situation a couple years back where I backed up an entire photo library of about 800 gigabytes across multiple folders onto one of their 4TB models. The transfer stalled at around 60 percent. The system said it was still writing. It was not. The drive's firmware had hit a buffer limit and was silently dropping packets. I disconnected and reconnected the drive, restarted the copy, and it finished in about two hours instead of the projected six. The workaround is to never do one massive bulk transfer on these drives. Break it into chunks of 50 to 100 gigabytes and let the drive cool between cycles. Mechanical drives in thin enclosures run hot, and heat throttles performance quickly.
Security is a separate topic entirely. Some Kjell drives come with built-in hardware encryption. Check the model number on the box before you buy. The ones that include it usually support AES 256-bit locking via a physical button or software utility. The software is generic and not particularly polished, but it works. If you want serious encryption without relying on whatever utility Kjell includes, just use BitLocker on Windows or FileVault on Mac. Format the drive to NTFS or APFS and enable native encryption. It does not require any special hardware and it is far more reliable than manufacturer-supplied encryption tools that tend to break after a firmware update. One thing most people miss is that not all USB cables matter equally with these drives. The cable included in the box is usually USB 2.0 quality even though the connector is USB 3.0. That means you are capping your transfer speed at about 40 megabytes per second until you replace it with a proper USB 3.0 cable. A decent cable costs about five dollars and immediately doubles your real world speed. I learned that the hard way when I thought the drive was broken and spent an hour troubleshooting before swapping the cable and seeing speeds jump to 130 megabytes per second.
What These Drives Are Actually Good For
Budget time machine backups. Casual media storage. Occasional file transfers between computers. Anything you need to carry in a bag without worrying about it getting damaged from drops. The enclosures are plastic and lightweight, which is both a strength and a weakness. They survive being tossed in a backpack better than desktop drives, but they also offer zero shock protection during operation.
Where They Fall Apart
Never use a Kjell external HDD as your primary workspace drive. Running applications off these units will feel sluggish compared to an internal SATA or NVMe drive. They are also not suitable for server environments or NAS replacement unless you accept the risk. The failure rate on budget external drives is not dramatically higher than name-brand alternatives, but when one does fail, data recovery is expensive and not guaranteed. I once had a drive that stopped spinning after 14 months of light use. The SMART data showed no errors. The motor simply gave out. No warning signs, no slow degradation. Just dead one day. That is the reality with these drives. They work until they don't, and then they are gone.Get the Full Details
For anything you cannot afford to lose, maintain a separate backup using the 3-2-1 rule. Three copies of your data, two different media types, one offsite. An external hard drive is one copy. It is not a strategy. It is a component of one. If you need faster performance and better reliability, the Kjell Company SSD range is a better investment. The prices are competitive and the controllers are decent. For spinning rust, they are adequate for the price point. Just do not expect miracles and always keep a secondary backup somewhere else.
