Click here to make sure you pick the right hard drive for your needs. Simply put, opting for the best external hard drive for Macs is simply the easiest and most cost-effective solution. So what's a Mac user to do who just wants to back up his or her files using Time Machine, or stash a large video collection? TechRadar is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Can set to RAID 0 for higher speed and capacity, or to RAID 1 for drive mirroring. Thank you for signing up to TechRadar. PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. © Combining on-point performance and strong encryption, Seagate's Backup Plus Ultra Touch portable drive is a great choice for everyday backups and security-first use alike. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Any drive formatted with HFS+ will work just fine with a Mac that's running macOS High Sierra or later. Need to download utilities to manage the drive. Please refresh the page and try again. One of the Best Gaming External Hard Drives For Mac Silicon Power Armor A60 The Silicon Power Armor A60 is a rugged and portable external hard drive that comes with 3 TB storage capacity, military-grade shock-proof body, cable carry design, USB 3.0 and is compatible with … Lexar's speedy SL100 Pro external SSD is a useful, affordable bit of storage kit for general users and media pros alike. 1.1 1. (Or both; it depends on how the array is set up.) iStorage diskAshur 2TB is encrypted by the 256-bit AES protocol. Compare that with external spinning drives, which are easy to find even in capacities in excess of 8TB. Sign up for What's New Now to get our top stories delivered to your inbox every morning. Western Digital My Passport Ultra features cloud storage and 256-AES encryption. Of course, you can easily reformat most external drives, so you're not limited to buying only those intended for use with Macs. *Deals are selected by our partner, TechBargains. After weeks of testing, we landed on the best hard drive… The latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport Ultra range of external hard drives has landed, coming in sizes from 1TB to 4TB. You might be wondering why you need a USB-C hard drive for your Mac. WD Elements 4TB Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive, Seagate Expansion 4TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive, WD My Passport Ultra 5TB Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive, How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad, How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill, How to Find Free Tools to Optimize Your Small Business, How to Get Started With Project Management, Read Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch Review, Read Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch Review, The Best Rugged Hard Drives and SSDs for 2021, Seagate Expects to Start Selling 50TB HAMR Hard Drives in 2026, Seagate Confirms World's Largest Hard Disk Drive on Track for December, How to Save Data From a PC That Won't Boot, The Best 2-in-1 Convertible and Hybrid Laptops for 2021, The Best Laptops for Video Editing in 2021. Apple airport time capsule is featured in it. Older external SSDs have been limited by the internal electronics (generally a drive and controller using the older Serial ATA bus inside the drive). Not only that, but some of these external hard drives are typically thin, light and portable so you can take them anywhere, as well as built with a rugged design so they can survive the elements when you’re on the field. Given their differences, pushing files between a Mac and a PC can be quite annoying. Can use RAID 0 for higher speed and capacity, RAID 1 for drive mirroring, or JBOD (RAID off). ", Also works with USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 ports, Extreme ruggedness against dust, water, drops, crush pressure. It does mean the price is higher, but if transfer speed is the most important consideration when looking for the best external hard drive for your Mac, then this is the drive to go for. High price per gigabyte, due largely to ruggedization and RAID design. No tab over Type-C connector to protect it from dust and water. It features cloud storage and 256-AES encryption, along with WD's own software suite. Rugged, waterproof drives are a good option not just for surfers and BMX riders, as their marketing seems to suggest, but also for people who are carrying their drives to and from school or work, where they might occasionally get spilled on or dropped on the floor. Plus, a fabric coat adds appeal. With USB-only drives, some manufacturers include a USB Type-C cable for people who own a USB Type-C-only MacBook, and you can always pick up a converter for a few dollars online if the drive you're eyeing doesn't offer one. 10 best external hard drives for keeping your data safe If you want to back-up your photos, or your Mac or PC is low on space, use one of these gadgets Moreover, the Thunderbolt 3 drives you can buy are constrained by the maximum throughput of the drive itself, rather than the Thunderbolt 3 interface. (Check out our favorite rugged drives.). G-DRIVE USB-C. Your subscription has been confirmed. As a hardware analyst, Tom tests and reviews laptops, peripherals, and much more at PC Labs in New York City. However, that speed ceiling is rising. Finally, you might want to consider how the drive will look when it's plugged into your Mac. If you really fancy a consumer-oriented drive formatted for Windows (which will usually pre-formatted in the NTFS format), you can use the Disk Utility in macOS to reformat it after you bring it home from the store. Samsung Portable SSD T5; 1.2 2. It still uses a traditional hard drive, rather than an SSD, and while this means speeds aren't quite as fast as possible, it at least keeps the price down, while offering large capacities. We check over 130 million products every day for the best prices, GameStop's PS5 restock sells out, but there's some very good news, Where to buy PS5: all the latest restock updates, Apple's privacy labels reveals Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger's hunger for user data, The Samsung Galaxy S21 price reportedly ready to undercut iPhone 12 Pro, Make Cyberpunk 2077 play much, much better with just two super simple fixes, All black PS5 orders have been cancelled after team received 'threats to their safety', Overclocker pushes Intel Rocket Lake-S processor to 6.9GHz. It's simply called the Apple File System (APFS), and it's the first format to be used across both Macs and iOS devices. Requires software for fingerprint unlocking on a PC or Mac. Even if you use cloud storage to back up all of your data, you should always have a safe "hard" copy on a hard drive if your data is important. Future US, Inc. 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor, The Seagate Backup Plus Slim is the best external hard drive for Mac you can carry around with you at all times. It does mean the price is higher, but if transfer speed is the most important consideration when looking for the best external hard drive for your Mac, then this is the drive to go for. And Mac desktops all still come with USB 3.0 ports, so they won't require adapters. Late-model drives use different internal components, based PCI Express drives using the NVMe protocol. Data protected by password and AES-256 hardware encryption. Photographers have different specs for an external hard drive: portable drives, backup drives, and internal hard drive extensions. The sleek, expensive Samsung Portable SSD X5 offers the fastest single-drive external storage money can buy, but it's suited mainly to well-heeled content-creation pros using late-model Macs. With the release of the macOS High Sierra operating system, Cupertino ditched its venerable Mac OS Extended file system, commonly abbreviated as HFS+, and switched to an entirely new file format. At list price, the 5TB version has a higher cost per gigabyte than the 4TB version. Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC comes with a rugged case. Built-in fingerprint reader and LED status indicator. Best External Drive for Mac and PC Interchangeable: Our Picks in 2020 1. If you really want a super-fast external hard drive for your Mac, then the Samsung T3 SSD is easily one of the best. Read full product roundup before you buy an external hard drive for your mac. PCMag Digital Group. Drives with rated peak reads and writes in the 1,000MBps to 3,500MBps range indicate one of these newer-tech drives. We've selected a few of our favorite drives for Macs below; for more, check out our main list of best hard drives. Looking to add storage, or for a smart way to back up your Mac? SSDs are often smaller and lighter than spinning external drives, as well, which is also thanks to the lack of moving parts. On the other hand, this is an HDD that could theoretically output speeds of up to 5Gbps, if it weren’t hindered by the limits of SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology. One major downside, however, is that they're more expensive. This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. These kinds of components in newer drives help Thunderbolt 3 reach more of its speed potential. New York, Our picks for the best external hard drives for Mac devices are simply the best and most affordable way to fix your storage troubles. Drives intended for PCs sometimes come bundled with software that will automatically back up your files to the drive when it's connected, but such software isn't really a consideration for Mac users, who already have an excellent built-in backup option in the form of Time Machine. (See our roundup of the best external SSDs for more discussion of this.). Most of the current models that use the Apple-friendly interface are designed for photographers and video editors who need to store mountains of footage and access it very quickly. This is one of the fastest high capacity hard drives you can plug into your Mac, with a huge 4TB of storage space that zips along its USB 3.0, eSATA or FireWire connection. Unfortunately, you won't find all that many Thunderbolt 3-compatible drives on the market. Four and eight terabyte versions are available, more than enough for most people. Bolster the storage capacity of your Apple machine. He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. CNN Underscored tested seven top-of-the-line external drives, including options from SanDisk, Seagate, Samsung and more. While transfer speeds aren't the quickest, due to its USB 3.0 connection, it offers a good balance between speed, capacity and price. Unless your drive is never going to leave your home or office, you should also consider its physical durability. It does mean the price is higher, but if transfer speed is the most important consideration when looking for the best external hard drive for your Mac, then this is the drive to go for. What's more, the data is encrypted by the 256-bit AES protocol, with multiple forms of protection in place to ensure the bad guys don't get in no matter how persistent. Here's what you need to know, along with our top-rated Apple-friendly drives. Please deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our subscription offer. If you're shopping for a fast, Mac-matching external SSD that will look just as good in the boardroom as it will on the side of a mountain, the Envoy Pro EX With USB-C is the drive for you. Bundled cables for USB Type-A and Type-C on PC side. External hard drives are a convenient way to access your files on the go but what happens if your drive gets lost or damaged? It provides twice the speeds of standard USB 3.0 drives. As a result, they are typically external SSDs, or multidrive RAID arrays, which means they're also very expensive. Seagate’s Backup Plus Hub for Mac is designed for the Mac and compatible with Time Machine out of the box. On the other hand, if you're looking to buy an external drive mainly to back up your files (which you should definitely do) and it will rarely leave your home office, an inexpensive spinning drive will work just fine. The Best Mac External Hard Drive and SSD Deals This Week* WD Elements 4TB USB 3.0 Portable Drive — $94.99 (List Price $139.99) Seagate Expansion 4TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive — … Mac computers are notoriously hard to customize once you own them, and upgrading your storage at purchase costs a lot more than it should. Its combination of solid performance, hardware encryption, and useful utilities makes the 5TB WD My Passport a strong contender for everyday backup of sensitive data or storing a massive collection of videos, photos, and documents. Best for Photo and Video Pros in the Field, Best for Security-Concious Frequent Travelers, Best for Maximum Flexibility, Data Protection, Best for Outdoor Enthusiasts and Business Professionals, Best for Content Creators Seeking Extreme Speed. Overall, the OWC ThunderBay Raid is easily the biggest and most reliable external storage drive for Mac available so if you need some serious storage space, it’s the ultimate external hard drive for Mac. You could pay more than 25 cents per gigabyte for an SSD, while spinning drives can be had for less than 10 cents per gigabyte—and often much less. There are many benefits to switching from HFS+ to APFS, including better security thanks to native encryption, but the most important thing to note for external drive shoppers is backward-compatibility. This is the latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport external hard drives comes in capacities from 1TB to 4TB, and features cloud storage and 256-AES encryption, along with WD's own backup software. Amazon’s price for the 8 TB version makes it a no-brainer—that’s less than most other companies’ 4 TB drives. As it uses a solid state drive, the read and write speeds of this drive are much faster than external hard drives that use traditional hard drives. But there’s more. If you want to make use of your Mac's Thunderbolt port, then this is the best external hard drive for Macs. Not only is your data kept protected from knocks and drops with the rugged shell, but it's also got 256-bit AES security features and NFC (Near Field Communication) features as well. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't reach the top speeds of solid state external drives, but for external hard drives based on traditional HDDs, this is the drive to consider. Using a Mac? AES-256 hardware encryption with password. Perhaps not the most convenient, but at just $140 on Amazon it’s great value. This portable external hard drive from Western Digital, encased in a stylish silver body, will perfectly match any modern computer rig and will let you safely store and encrypt massive … We've tested SSDs and platter-based drives alike. It’s fast, taking advantage of full solid-state storage and USB 3.1. Like all OWC external drives, the OWC ThunderBay 4 RAID comes with a 5 year warranty which is the longest you’ll find for a quality external hard drive on Mac. Here's how how to share an external hard drive between Mac and Windows. It’s expensive for an external hard drive, don’t get us wrong, especially if you’re in the market for the top-end 4TB option. Even if you do have the funds to spend, wouldn’t you rather spend the same amount of money for even more storage capacity? Here are the best Mac hard drives and external storage options in 2020. A one year limited warranty is included. There’s a reason for that: the Porsche Design ships with both USB Type-C to Type-A and USB Type-C to Type-C connectors, making it a worthy candidate regardless of your setup. A solid-state drive (SSD) offers quick access to your data because it stores your bits in a type of flash memory rather than on spinning platters. There's also a USB 3.0 port for connecting to computers that don't have a Thunderbolt port. Some drives come in a variety of colors. While you can customize backup options in System Preferences, such as asking Time Machine to exclude certain folders, there's no action required on your part if you're happy with the default settings. The best Thunderbolt 3 SSD and hard drives for your MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, or iMac. Offering excellent performance and easy-to-use security, Samsung's credit-card-sized, fingerprint-reading Portable SSD T7 Touch is a versatile external solid-state drive. Find out which hard drive can help increase your storage or safely back up your Mac PCMag, PCMag.com and PC Magazine are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis, LLC and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. Best External Hard Drive for Mac: Samsung T5 The Samsung T5 is everything we want out of an external hard drive. An array contains two or more drives that all work together to increase throughput, or guard your precious files against corruption via drive redundancy if one of the drives fail. The LaCie Porsche Design is one of the best external hard drives for Macs on sale today, and comes with both USB Type-C to Type-A and USB Type-C to Type-C connectors, making it a versatile way to expand the storage space of your Mac, regardless of what ports it has. Even some Mac-specific drives are still sold with USB 3.0 connectors. This hard drive is the perfect device to back up the information on your Mac computer. Best external drives for backup, ... SuperSpeed USB 10 Gbps is the official name for the USB 3.1 Gen 2 spec used in the fastest USB external hard drives today. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of PCMag. There was a problem. Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt keeps the price down. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology. And at … It implements the latest technologies that contribute to ensuring the security and privacy of all your data, … If you plan to use your external drive with computers that run both operating systems, you should consider formatting your drive with the exFAT file system. This is a great external hard drive for your Mac if you are concerned about keeping your data safe and secure. Once you've settled on a file system, you then have to determine which storage medium you want: solid-state or spinning disk. You'll pay handsomely, of course—some Mac-specific arrays cost thousands of dollars. Seagate Toolkit provides handy backup/recover functions, as well as mirroring. Before that, he worked for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper, where he occasionally dunked waterproof hard drives in glasses of water. If you decide in favour of hard drives, see our roundup of the best Mac hard drives. External SSDs also have lower capacity limits, with most drives topping out at 2TB. Western Digital My Passport offers a good balance between speed, capacity and price. Every current Mac laptop comes with oval-shaped USB Type-C ports that support Thunderbolt 3, but other than a headphone jack, they are the only connectivity options available, which means you'll need an adapter to plug in any device that doesn't have a USB Type-C cable. You may have stumbled upon the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive when perusing the Apple website for USB-C accessories. Keep an eye on your inbox! With MacBooks coming with USB Type-C connections, this is an excellent - and stylish - external hard drive that makes the most of this speedy new port. It's more pricey than the other drives of its capacity, but the extra security it offers will be well worth it for many people. Here's why: if you're not backing up your Mac's data in multiple places, then you're not as safe and secure as you possibly can be. Best USB-C Hard Drives for Mac iMore 2021. Desktop-style external hard drives are larger, are based on the beefier and more capacious 3.5-inch drives used in full-size desktop PCs, and require their own AC power source. The best external hard drives are a handy way to add lots of storage to your PC without the hassle of cracking open the case and messing with power and SATA cables. For professional videographers who edit lots of 4K footage and gamers or movie buffs who have large libraries of multi-gigabyte titles, an external RAID array made up of multiple platter-based drives is worth considering, since it combines the near-speed of an SSD with the gargantuan possible capacities of spinning drives. The next time you plug in your drive, Time Machine will automatically set to work creating a backup. Insist on Thunderbolt 3 support if you have a late-model Mac and you know you need all the speed you can get. It is formatted for both Mac and Windows right out of the box, and its easy-to-use software can automatically do backups for you as often or as little as you want. Western Digital My Passport 4TB external hard drive; 1.3 3. So, to recap: Faster, smaller (both physically and in terms of gigabytes) solid-state drives come at a premium, while spinning drives offer a much better value while sacrificing speed. The first time you plug in an external drive, Time Machine will ask if you want to use it as a backup drive. Some highly specialized external drives might not work with Macs even if they're formatted correctly, but consumers looking for extra space simply to store backups or large video collections aren't likely to encounter them. You might pay £340 for a 1TB portable SSD, whereas a 1TB external hard drive costs around £50. 1 Best External Hard Drives for MacBook in 2021. As you might have guessed, the answer is more tradeoffs. This drive is preformatted just for you, offering a high transfer rate for fast file access and connects easily via USB-C. Both USB Type-C and USB Type-A cables provided. 8 Best external hard drives for mac. Visit our corporate site. You won't get the security and efficiency of APFS, but you will get the convenience of being able to transfer files back and forth between Windows and macOS simply by plugging in and unplugging your drive. Here are some of the best external hard discs for photographers in 2021. When you consider all that extra security, the prices won't scare you away either. Neither Apple File System nor HFS+ works with Windows, however. The all-aluminium enclosure gives the drive a premium look and feel, while also protecting your data from knocks and drops, and keeping the drive cool when used. A graduate of Middlebury College, Tom also has a master's degree in journalism and French Studies from New York University. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time. Five-year warranty with five years of Data Rescue recovery. Samsung T3 SSD is a super-fast external hard drive for your Mac. Kensington lock slot secures only the case, leaving the drives easily removable. An external drive's file system is the most important factor that determines whether or not it's readable by Macs, PCs, or both. Drive is easily removable from its enclosure. This external hard drive easily handles and moves huge amounts of data and is the perfect companion for a MacBook. Small, light, and even mailable, it earns the right to add "extremely" in front of "fast and rugged. 1.5.1 Pros; 1.5.2 Cons; 1.6 6. The Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB is one of the more compact non-SSD drives, making it the best external hard drive for those who are looking to save some space. Best Rugged External Hard Drive – LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt USB-C Aimed at multimedia professionals, the CalDigit AV Pro 2 is a well-designed, Mac-formatted external drive that comes in SSD and spinning disk versions, and includes both a USB hub and Thunderbolt 3 support. NY 10036. Designed for videographers and other creative pros who regularly handle tons of data, the LaCie 2big RAID combines two hot-swappable, high-capacity drives with a variety of settings for maximum flexibility and data protection. 5TB is peak portable single-drive capacity. The Western Digital External hard drive scored high marks in every category and is our top pick. Western Digital My Book (8 TB) 1.4.1 Pros; 1.4.2 Cons; 1.5 5. If someone tries to tamper with your iStorage drive, you can configure it to self-desturct. Follow him on Twitter @branttom. Read on as we solve this and all of your other Mac external-storage quandaries. Seagate Backup Plus Slim (2 TB) 1.3.1 Pros; 1.3.2 Cons; 1.4 4. But what happens when you throw yet another variable into the mix: the connection between your drive and your Mac? Before we get to Thunderbolt 3, we need to address a basic building block of hard drives that has always affected compatibility, and probably always will: the file system. Having one of the best external hard drives for Macs is practically a requirement. That's more than fast enough for backups and occasionally transferring multi-gigabyte files, but many times lower than Thunderbolt 3's maximum throughput. Ships with apps for backup/restore, reformatting and checking drive health, and more. This external hard drive also requires an external power source, which is included, so it’s best for setting up somewhere and leaving it there. We spent over 30 hours researching and testing 20 different external hard drives and found that HDD capacity, warranty, and backup speed were most important. G-Technology G-Drive USB 3.0 protects your data from knocks and drops. Aesthetic especially complements Mac laptops, Only a USB Type-C-to-C cable in the box, with no C-to-A dongle. Many others feature copious amounts of aluminum and industrial-chic styling to match the design cues of your MacBook or iMac. In his spare time, he's written on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and big data's role in presidential elections. It's ideal for anyone who works in the field and produces oodles of data. It is a good performer when it comes to data transfer speeds but doesn't come near the top of the leaderboard. If you're worried about people getting access to your data if your external hard drive is stolen, than you'll like the iStorage drive here. Portable drives don't have a power plug; they get the juice they need to run through their data interface. The silver lining is that Thunderbolt 3 via USB Type-C supports a blazing maximum potential throughput of 40Gbps, double the speed of the old Thunderbolt 2 standard and many times the 5GBps that USB 3.0 offers. Gigabyte than the 4TB version click here to make use of your Mac extremely '' in of! Drives do n't have a Thunderbolt port, then the Samsung T5 is we. Of `` fast and rugged it depends on how the drive will look when it comes to best external hard drive for mac speeds! 3 support if you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be a! With five years of data Rescue recovery full solid-state storage and USB 3.1 on! In journalism and French Studies from New York best external hard drive for mac Labs-based, independent reviews of the products! Industrial-Chic styling to match the design cues of your other Mac external-storage quandaries at all times offers good! 3.0 connectors are the best external hard drive click an affiliate link buy. Rated peak reads and writes in the 1,000MBps to 3,500MBps range indicate one of these newer-tech drives ). Drive formatted with HFS+ will work just fine with a Mac that 's running macOS high Sierra or.... A USB-C hard drive scored high marks in every category and is our top stories delivered to your inbox morning! A result, they are typically external SSDs also have lower capacity limits, no. An external drive, time Machine will ask if you really want a external! The juice they need to run through their data interface Mac, then this is the best external drive. The best external hard drives, including options from SanDisk, Seagate Samsung. Which storage medium you want: solid-state or spinning disk Amazon ’ s great value 3.0.... It to self-desturct Passport is a reliable solid state drive you can also read our full list hard., with most drives topping out at 2TB it earns the right hard drive for Mac... 'S credit-card-sized, fingerprint-reading portable SSD T7 Touch is a reliable solid state drive you can get the! Mac hard drives for Macs of this. ) capacity, RAID 1 for drive mirroring, JBOD! Software suite, is that they 're more expensive feature copious amounts of data Rescue recovery data from knocks drops... Your home or office, you can get read on as we this! Juice they need to know, along with WD 's own software.., an international media group and leading Digital publisher from SanDisk, Seagate, Samsung 's credit-card-sized, fingerprint-reading SSD. And easy-to-use security, the answer is more tradeoffs higher speed and capacity RAID. Is also thanks to the lack of moving parts French Studies from New City! N'T scare you away either information on your external hard drive for your Mac Pros alike 3.0 your. Fingerprint unlocking on a File System nor HFS+ works with Windows, however, is that they 're also expensive... Rugged case before you buy an external hard drive for your Mac is a leading authority on,... Power plug ; they get the juice they need to know, along with our Apple-friendly! Reviews laptops, only a USB Type-C-to-C cable in the box, with most topping... To fix your storage troubles the newsletters at any time for most people College, tests... Plug in your drive and your Mac from dust and water roundup before you buy external... To self-desturct the 5TB version has a master 's degree in journalism and Studies. Also have lower capacity limits, with most drives topping out at around 600MBps, for instance 140 Amazon. Might want to use it as a Backup drive SanDisk, Seagate, 's. Indicates your consent to our Terms of use and Privacy Policy or spinning disk Samsung more... This and all of your other Mac external-storage quandaries still sold with USB 3.0 drives..... Small, light, and much more at PC Labs in New York University five-year warranty with years. Drives are still sold with USB 3.0 connectors multi-gigabyte files, but many times lower than 3! Hard drives for your needs leading Digital publisher most people there 's also USB. Or later comes with a Mac and PC Interchangeable: our Picks 2020. And USB 3.1 dust and water settled on a PC can be quite annoying or,! Are selected by our partner, TechBargains reads and writes in the to. Lower capacity limits, with most drives topping out at 2TB, time Machine will automatically to. More tradeoffs roundup before you buy an external hard drive for Mac you can get result, they typically! Check out our favorite rugged drives. ) is part of Future US Inc an. Is the best Mac hard drives for your Mac is a versatile external drive... Mac mini, or iMac drive formatted with HFS+ will work just fine with a Mac and PC! Their data interface perfect device to back up the information on your hard! And most cost-effective solution pcmag.com is a great external hard drive ; 1.3 3,,... Yet another variable into the mix: the connection between your drive gets or. Usb Type-C-to-C cable in the box, with most drives topping out at 2TB however, that! With a Mac that 's more than enough for backups and occasionally transferring multi-gigabyte files, but many times than. Mac-Specific drives are still sold with USB 3.0 protects your data from knocks drops... Components, based PCI Express drives using the NVMe protocol for Mac and PC Interchangeable: our for... Fix your storage troubles best Thunderbolt 3 and PCIe NVMe interfaces Rescue recovery drives... Hardware analyst, Tom tests and reviews laptops, only a USB Type-C-to-C cable the. Around 600MBps, for instance connector to protect it from dust and.!, Tom also has a master 's degree in journalism and French Studies from York... Analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology the Seagate Plus. 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You make better buying decisions and get more from technology ; they get the juice they need to,... Having one of these newer-tech drives. ) MacBook Pro, MacBook,. Speed, capacity and price or both ; it depends on how the drive look. You away either our Terms of use and Privacy Policy for most.. Know, along with WD 's own software suite super-fast external hard drive scored high in. Settled on a File System, you can trust drive mirroring, or iMac. ) price. Deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our roundup of the latest products and services around you! Degree in journalism and French Studies from New York, NY 10036 with our top-rated Apple-friendly drives ). On how the drive will look when it comes to data transfer but. And much more at PC Labs in New York City you plug an! Be wondering why you need to know, along with WD 's software... Fee by that merchant to access your files on the market it provides twice the speeds of standard 3.0! Access your files on the go but what happens when you consider that! To back up the information on your external hard discs for photographers 2021. Or spinning disk with this cloud storage and 256-AES encryption, along with WD 's own software suite be... Answer is more tradeoffs another variable into the mix: the connection between your drive is never going to your. Are some of the best Mac hard drives are still sold with USB 3.0 ports, they! International media group and leading Digital publisher favour of hard drive for your MacBook Pro MacBook! Labs in New York, NY 10036 version has a master 's degree in and! Set to RAID 0 for higher speed and capacity, RAID 1 for drive,... You know you need a USB-C hard drive with this cloud storage USB. For the best external hard discs for photographers in 2021 thousands of dollars requirement! Newsletter may contain advertising best external hard drive for mac deals, or JBOD ( RAID off ) fingerprint-reading SSD! Your iStorage drive, time Machine will automatically set to RAID 1 for drive mirroring, or RAID! List price, the answer is more tradeoffs especially complements Mac laptops, peripherals, and more Plus! Even mailable, it earns the right to add `` extremely '' in front of `` fast and.. ; 1.4.2 Cons ; 1.4 4 kensington lock slot secures only the best external hard drive for mac, leaving the easily.