However, because Apple makes upgrading your storage unbelievably pricey, Mac and MacBook users need them even more. As a bonus, these drives are also built to be light, portable, and rugged so you can take them anywhere. Why not get one of the best external hard drives made for Macs?
Here are our top picks below, alongside our price comparison tool so you can also get the best deal available. IDrive , the cloud storage veteran, delivers tons of storage online for an incredibly small outlay.
While transfer speeds aren't the quickest, due to its USB 3. If you want to make use of your Mac's Thunderbolt port, then this is the best external hard drive for Macs. It provides twice the speeds of standard USB 3. 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.
There's also a USB 3. 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. 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. 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.
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. Not only is your data kept protected from knocks and drops with the rugged shell, but it's also got bit AES security features and NFC Near Field Communication features as well. This is a great external hard drive for your Mac if you are concerned about keeping your data safe and secure. It is a good performer when it comes to data transfer speeds but doesn't come near the top of the leaderboard.
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. If you drop a laptop when its hard drive is spinning, the drive can be damaged, and you can lose data.
SSDs tend to be more reliable overall, and if they fail, you can still read data unless the actual memory chips are damaged , whereas you may not be able to do this with a hard disk. However, SSDs are much more expensive when you look at the cost to storage ratio. There is another kind of drive that combines the two technologies: the hybrid drive, or what Apple calls the fusion drive.
The drive copies the most frequently used files to the flash storage, so they can be accessed more quickly. This generally includes the operating system, apps you use often, and files you access regularly.
The first time you boot and launch apps, files are read from the hard disk, and then moved to the SSD part of the drive; subsequently, accessing those files is much faster. However, hybrid drives have all the disadvantages of hard drives, and only some of the advantages of SSDs.
Most people do not want a Mac without an SSD, because an SSD enables it to boot much faster, apps launch faster, and files copy more quickly. However, if you need much more storage than what an SSD can offer, perhaps because of a large media collection, you have two options: a hybrid drive, or an external hard drive. The larger SSD element means more files can be cached, and your Mac will run a lot faster. The future is flash. In truth, however, there is no reason to buy a huge SSD, unless you work with very large files such as video , or you need to carry lots of files with you on the road and cannot use a portable hard drive.
During periods when the drive is idle, this drops to one-tenth 10 percent of a spinning hard drive's power usage. When an upgrade is purchased, the existing internal hard drive is removed, and the SSD takes its place. Some SSD upgrade kits include the tools necessary for opening your specific MacBook model, and may also include a separate case for your internal hard drive, allowing you to attach it later as an external drive connected to your USB or Firewire ports.
Ellis Davidson has been a self-employed Internet and technology consultant, entrepreneur and author since He has written a book about self-employment for recent college graduates and is a regular contributor to "Macworld" and the TidBITS technology newsletter.
He is completing a book on self-employment options during a recession.
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