For traditional drives, prices are low, options are numerous, and capacities are so high that your only choices are “enough space,” “more than enough space,” and “way more than enough space.” I could point you towards a gigantic 5-Terabyte $139 Seagate USB 3.0 hard drive right now and end this article without another paragraph. An external hard drive is essentially a hard drive packed into a briefcase.I feel old saying this, but having used computers since before external hard drives existed, I can say with certainty that buying a hard drive is easier today than it’s ever been before. This list of the best external hard drives for Mac will help you choose the best drive for your computer. Therefore, one of the most affordable (and easiest) ways to increase the storage space on your Mac or MacBook is to use an external hard drive.Released in the summer of 2018, it’s the company’s latest Thunderbolt 3 device to combine blazing speeds with a rugged build. G-Technology’s G-Drive Pro is the bigger and faster brother to its standard non-pro sibling. Choosing between an SSD or HDD means.6 G-Technology G-Drive Mobile Pro SSD. For $139!The first step in creating a backup for your Mac is choosing an external drive that enables the best data recovery option. Or you could store a decade worth of digital photos alongside a giant media library.
Macbook Pro user and this portable external hard drive is extremely great for.Most hard drives are guaranteed to work for one to two years no matter what you do with them, ranging from occasional backups to continuous video streaming. When you consider price, ease of use, and portability, the Seagate Ultra Touch HDD is the most reliable hard drive you can carry around with you at all times.The My Passport for Mac drive is trusted, portable storage that perfectly. 91.56.The best external hard drives for macOS Big Sur are not only useful for storing data but are an excellent way to transport files from one location to another. So in this How-To, I’m going to discuss the big issues you need to consider, and guide you towards the best external hard drive for your needs…Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD Silver USB 3.0 For PC Laptop And Mac, 1 year Mylio Create, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography (STHN2000401) 4.7 out of 5 stars. Some hard drives are really cheap but have a higher chance of failing after a year or two of heavy use. That low percentage may seem reassuring, but it obscures the reality that heavy drive use increases failures over time, and some drives are much better-suited to heavy use than others.My advice: purchase your drive with a specific purpose in mind. So drive makers switched to a different but even less useful metric: Annualized Failure Rate (AFR), which estimates the percentage of total drives made that will fail in a year due to manufacturing defects. All an AFR of “0.73%” suggests is that 7,300 of 1,000,000 drives will likely develop problems in year one due to defects rather than abuse. Desktop drives typically promised higher MTBFs than laptop drives, but there were exceptions.Unfortunately, MTBF numbers were only predictions — and often inaccurately high. Each year has 61,320 hours, so a drive with a MTBF of 300,000 hours would promise to last 4.9 years if actively used 24 hours each day. Hard drive longevity used to be measured with an estimate of “Mean Time Before Failure” (MTBF). However — and this is really important — if you keep a typical drive mechanism running 24 hours each day for two years, it’s going to burn out. Best External Hard Drives 2018 Download At AnyThat said, there are sweet spots.Expect to pay around $70 for a basic 1TB drive, $85 for 2TB, $100 for 3TB, $120 for 4TB, $150 for 5TB, $250 for 6TB, or $300 for 8TB. Most people will find that that 4TB is more than enough to hold years of accumulated photos, media files, and data, but there’s no wrong answer to the capacity question: it’s mostly a matter of personal preference right now. But if you’re just using a drive to store apps, games, or iTunes movies that you can easily re-download at any time, or only intermittently turn a drive on for backups, you can feel comfortable going with something cheaper, more portable, or fancier-looking.It’s easy to pick the right hard drive capacity these days: most external drives now offer at least as much space as a standard Mac (1TB) — and there are thousands of options to choose from — and you can get an 8-Terabyte drive for only $300. It doesn’t really matter how the drive looks, just that it will work for a long time. Watch dogs game for macThey’ll typically last longer, which is worth something. You’re better off considering 2TB, 4TB or 5TB units instead.Don’t be surprised that longer-lasting drives can cost twice as much as basic models. Generally, 3TB to 5TB would be the sweet spots between capacity and pricing, but Amazon customer reviews of the 3TB Expansion mirror comments I’ve seen elsewhere online: Seagate’s 3TB units had lots of problems. The prices for Seagate’s Backup Plus Slim portable drives are similar up until the 4TB mark, where the price doubles. Go with a G-Drive if you need a large reliable drive, or T1 if you want something small and reliable.There are five major types of external hard drives: enterprise-class desktop drives, regular desktop drives, laptop-class portable drives, slim laptop-class portable drives, and flash drives. Samsung’s T1 SSD was covered in my guide to SSDs for Mac minis and MacBooks, and while it’s more expensive and lower-capacity than the G-Drive USB, it has no moving parts to worry about. I reviewed G-Tech’s excellent G-Drive USB for 9to5Mac, and have trusted their earlier drives for many years without any issues. (Only the very best internal SSDs now offer consumer 5-year and professional 10-year warranties, though notably with much less storage space than the drives covered in this article. See my How-To guides to SSDs for iMac, desktop Macs, and MacBooks here.)If reliability is your major concern, as it generally is mine, I’d suggest you look most seriously at G-Technology’s mechanical drives (featuring ultra-reliable Hitachi hard drive mechanisms) and Samsung’s external SSDs, all of which have three-year warranties. A three-year warranty is the best you can expect from a consumer-grade external drive from a top vendor, regardless of whether it’s a mechanical drive or SSD. SSDs are just beginning to become mainstream internal drives for computers, and their capacities aren’t yet at the “more than enough space” point.Since MTBF and AFR are such sketchy measures of hard drive reliability, I suggest that you focus on two more tangible factors: the reputation of the manufacturer, and the length of the drive’s warranty. Pick the one that appeals to your personal taste.Speed, Connectivity, iOS Compatibility, and Apple’s AirPort Time CapsulesA lot could be said about each of these topics, but I’ll save you some time and cut to the chase: recent developments mean that most people will be best off with USB 3.0 wired drives, except under one of three circumstances: you need incredible speed for Mac video editing, you want to stream video to your iOS devices, or you want to do automated wireless backups.If you’re planning on doing 4K or other disk-intensive Mac video editing, Thunderbolt hard drives such as Elgato’s Thunderbolt+ Drive or G-Tech’s G-RAID Studio Thunderbolt 2can deliver dramatically better speeds than drives that share your Mac’s USB bus. Either one can easily fit into a laptop bag, backpack, or purse, but Seven is much, much smaller.If you want a portable, reliable hard drive at a low price with minimal design frills, consider Western Digital’s #1 best-selling My Passport Ultra drives, which have a 4.5/5-Star Amazon user rating. But if you’re looking for something with a distinctive design — and willing to compromise a little on long-term reliability — LaCie’s collection of Philippe Starck, Neil Poulton, and Porsche Design drives are definitely the best around. Both use USB 3.0 for data and power, with no need for an external power supply. In January, I reviewed both Seagate’s Seven, the world’s thinnest external mechanical hard drive, and LaCie’s Mirror, a boxy mirrored drive with twice the capacity. ( Corsair makes $45 128GB and $75 256GB USB 3.0 flash drives if you want something tiny.) So if you need a portable hard drive with respectable storage capacity at a reasonable price, you’ll most likely pick a laptop-class drive with a 2.5″ hard drive mechanism inside.Owned by Seagate, boutique drive maker LaCie’s lineup nicely illustrates the relative size differences between the categories of external drives, though there are even smaller laptop and slim laptop drives out there now. Flash drives are keychain-sized but relatively limited in capacity and crazy expensive when they begin to approach laptop drive capacities. ![]()
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