Portable USB-powered hard drives provide a speedy and physically secure way to store and transport huge amounts of data that either wouldn't fit in a space-limited cloud account or would take. This portable hard drive is super fast and its read-write speed is up to 450 MB/S. The minimum storage capacity of this hard drive is 500 GB and maximum capacity is 2 TB. The hard drive is also Compatible with PC & Android OS.
- Best Portable Drive For Mac
- Mac Hard Drives For Sale
- Best Mac Compatible External Hard Dri…
- Best Portable Hard Drive
- Cnet Best Portable Hard Drive
- Best Portable Hard Drive For Mac
It's a Great Time to Go for a Drive
- USB-C is certainly the port of the future, so grabbing a USB-C hard drive for your MacBook or MacBook Pro is the best way to take all of your files, music, photos, and more with you wherever you go without clogging up your Mac's own hard drive.
- External hard drives are an inexpensive way to store our digital photos. For Mac users like me, external storage is often the only way to hold an image library that contains thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of digital images.
- Here we are going to review the top 5 best external hard drives for Mac that works on PC in 2017. This to Consider When you buy a External Hard drive for your Mac Type: Desktop class or portable type. Desktop class external hard drives for Mac have 3.5 inch mechanism hard disk which needs power adapter.
- Shop for Mac external hard drives at Best Buy. Compare and read customer reviews to purchase the Apple hard drive that fits your needs. Mac External Hard Drives. Categories & Filters. WD - My Passport for Mac 1TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive with Hardware Encryption - Black. Model: WDBFKF0010BBK-WESE. SKU: 6220721.
Best Portable Drive For Mac
In an era when Apple charges 99 cents per month for 50GB of iCloud storage and Google offers 100GB of free storage for two years with the purchase of a new Chromebook, mainstream external hard drives might appear less essential than they once were.
But modern external drives are faster, more stylish, and often more durable than their counterparts from a few years ago. They're ever cheaper and more capacious, too. For about $50, you can add a terabyte of extra storage to your laptop or desktop by just plugging in a USB cable.
Choosing an external drive isn't as simple as buying the most expensive one you can afford, however. The capacity and type of storage mechanism are the two most important factors to consider, and each one will increase or decrease the cost dramatically depending on your needs. Other factors include the physical size of the drive (is it designed to be carted around or to sit on your desk?), how rugged it is, the interface it uses to connect to your PC, and even what colors it comes in. This guide will help you make sense of all the options. Here are the key questions to ask as you shop.
The Need for Speed: Hard Drive or SSD?
Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells—similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM—to save data.
Just how much faster is it to access data stored in flash cells than those stored on a spinning platter? Typical read and write speeds for consumer drives with a single spinning platter are in the 100MBps to 200MBps range, depending on their USB interface and whether they spin at 5,400rpm (more common) or 7,200rpm (more expensive and less common). External SSDs offer twice that speed and sometimes much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature-length film, or a year's worth of family photos) to your external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning drive.
Not only is it faster to read and write data stored in flash cells than those stored on a spinning platter, but it's also safer. Because there is no spinning platter or moving magnetic head, if you bump the SSD while you're accessing its data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable.
While external SSDs are now readily available and cheaper than they were a few years ago, they're not a complete replacement for spinning drives. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still mostly use spinning drives, taking advantage of their higher capacities and lower prices compared with SSDs.
Physical Size Matters: Desktop or Portable Drive?
If you have a large photo or video collection—perhaps you are a photo or video editor, or maybe a movie buff—you'll likely need several terabytes of space in which to store it. So your best option is a desktop-class drive. We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives inside and requiring its own dedicated power cable. Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.
A desktop drive with a single platter mechanism inside will typically use a 3.5-inch drive inside and will be found in capacities up to 12TB, and most are roughly 5 inches tall and 2 inches wide. In addition to storing large media collections, these drives can also serve as inexpensive repositories for backups of your computer's hard drive that you schedule using either the software that came with the drive or a third-party backup utility.
The next size up for consumer desktop drives is about the same height but twice as wide to accommodate additional drive mechanisms in the chassis, such as with the Western Digital My Book Duo. These larger drives are more expensive but also much more capacious; the highest-capacity current models employ two drives for up to 20TB of storage. Note: In the case of these and single-platter-drive products, you're not meant to swap out the drive or drives inside.
The largest desktop drives are often much, much larger than the first two categories, so large that you'll want to stick them under your desk or in a dedicated server closet. They're mostly intended for professional use in editing studios, surveillance control rooms, and the like. Their defining characteristic is the ability to swap drives in and out easily, so they provide quick access to the drive bays at the front of the device. Most are sold without drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support 2.5-inchers). Their total storage capacities are usually limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them.
At the other end of the physical-size spectrum are portable drives, some of which now use an SSD inside instead of a spinning platter to save space, as well as to increase throughput and durability. These drives can be truly tiny, weighing just a few ounces and with their largest sides measuring less than 3 inches long, like with the Samsung Portable SSD T5. Others use spinning platters and are a bit larger, like the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Drive, but they still fit easily in a purse or even a coat pocket. Portable drives get their power from the computer to which you connect them, through the interface cable, so there's no need for a spare wall outlet.
Need Redundancy or Extreme Speed? Consider a RAID
If you buy a larger desktop drive with two or more spinning platters, you'll almost certainly have the ability to configure the drive as a RAID array using included software. Depending on which RAID level you choose, you can prioritize capacity, speed, or data redundancy, or some combination thereof.
A collection of spinning drives configured with a RAID level designed for faster access can approximate the speeds of an SSD, while you should consider a drive with support for RAID levels 1, 5, or 10 if you're storing really important data that you can't afford to lose. Hit the link above for explanation of the strengths of each RAID level.
What Interface Should You Look For?
Tagged for mac. How an external drive connects to your PC or Mac is second only to the type of storage mechanism it uses in determining how fast you'll be able to access data. Unfortunately, these connection types are constantly changing, and the internet is littered with outdated references to legacy interface types such as eSATA and FireWire.
Right now, the fastest mainstream connection type is Thunderbolt 3, which is handy assuming you have a newer laptop or desktop with a Thunderbolt 3 port. All late-model Apple laptops have them, but they're much scarcer on Windows machines. This interface uses a USB Type-C connector and offers blazing throughput of 40GBps. As an added bonus, a desktop drive that supports Thunderbolt 3 might also come with additional DisplayPort and USB connections that allow you to use the drive box as a hub for your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals.
You'll really only see the speed benefits of Thunderbolt 3, however, if you have a drive that's SSD-based, or a RAID array. If you'd rather save money than time transferring your data, if you're buying a desktop drive with a single platter-based mechanism inside, or if you have a PC that lacks Thunderbolt 3, you'll want to make sure your drive has a USB connection. Nearly every recent drive we reviewed supports USB, and the same goes for laptops and desktops.
Not all USB ports are created equal, though. The most prevalent is the standard rectangle shape (called Type-A) that's been present on devices for decades. The oval-shaped Type-C connector is quickly gaining traction, though. It's capable of supporting the USB 3.1 standard in addition to Thunderbolt 3, though most Type-C ports include only the former. If you buy a drive with a Type-C cable, make sure it also includes a cable with a rectangular Type-A plug if your PC lacks a Type-C port. Otherwise, you'll need to buy a separate cable or adapter.
Do You Need to Go Rugged?
Mac Hard Drives For Sale
If you carry your drive around frequently, you'll want to pay attention to how rugged the drive is. Some models include plastic bumpers, and some even meet military standards for shock and dust protection. (Look for support for specifications such as IP67 or IP68.)
And of course, if you're carrying your drive around with you, you want it to look nice. Some, like the Samsung T5, come in multiple colors, while others, like the ADATA SD700, are super-slim and ready to be tossed in a pocket.
Perhaps the only thing you don't need to pay much attention to is the warranty. If your drive breaks because you damaged it, the warranty likely won't cover it. Even if the drive fails because of a manufacturing defect, most warranties simply replace the drive and don't cover the cost of recovery services that attempt to rescue your data from the broken drive.
Let's Look at the Top Models We've Tested..
Also know that you can find external drives that do way more than just store your data. Some include SD card readers to offload footage from a camera or drone in the field, while others have built-in Wi-Fi and can double as an all-in-one home media server. Some of that kind even come with extra-large batteries that can charge your smartphone while you're on the go.
To get you started in the right direction toward the right add-on backup/storage solution, below are 10 of the best drives we've tested of late, at a variety of prices and capacities. Some are SSD-based, while others are platter.
Best External Hard Drives Featured in This Roundup:
CalDigit Tuff Review
MSRP: $179.99Pros: Rated to survive 4-foot drops. Certified waterproof and dustproof. Comes with USB 3.0 and USB-C cables.Cons: Warranty limited to two years. SSD option is still unreleased.Bottom Line: Not only is the CalDigit Tuff a rugged hard drive designed to survive extreme conditions, it's also a terrific value.Read ReviewWestern Digital My Book Review
MSRP: $249.99Pros: Comes in a variety of large capacities. Three-year warranty.Cons: Requires external power adapter.Bottom Line: With a full 8TB for less than $250, the 8TB version of the Western Digital My Book is a deep well of affordable storage for your photos, music, videos, and more.Read ReviewADATA HD830 External Hard Drive Review
MSRP: $109.99Pros: IP68 resistance to water and dust. Highly crush-resistant chassis. Aggressive price for capacity, build. Two colors to choose between.Cons: On the heavy, bulky side for some. Only waterproof and dustproof when the USB cover is closed. Could use a Type-C cable.Bottom Line: It's brawny, but the ADATA HD830 offers superior protection and value for the money in a rugged external platter-based drive.Read ReviewLaCie Mobile Drive Review
MSRP: $94.95Pros: Slick, faceted design. Solid-feeling aluminum enclosure. Useful LaCie Toolkit software handles backup and restore, as well as mirroring. On-the-mark performance.Cons: A little hefty. Toolkit utility requires a download.Bottom Line: A metal-skinned gem of a platter hard drive, the LaCie Mobile Drive looks great and performs on point. It's geared to macOS users, but it will please anyone with an eye for style in their gadgets.Read ReviewSamsung Portable SSD T5 Review
MSRP: $799.99Pros: Excellent performance. Includes USB 3.0 and USB-C cables. Compact. Android-, Mac-, and Windows-compatible.Cons: While a comparable good per-gigabyte value, the drive itself is expensive.Bottom Line: Samsung's Portable SSD T5 drive has a speedy USB-C interface, plenty of reliable storage, and it takes up about as much room in your pocket as a short stack of credit cards.Read ReviewSeagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch Review
MSRP: $89.99Pros: Fabric-covered enclosure. Small and light. Seagate Toolkit provides handy backup/recover functions, as well as mirroring. Data protected by password and AES-256 hardware encryption.Cons: Fabric cover a bit slippery to grip. Seagate Toolkit a separate download.Bottom Line: 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. Plus, a fabric coat adds appeal.Read ReviewAkitio Thunder3 RAID Station Review
MSRP: $369.99Pros: Excellent connectivity options and transfer speeds. Solid build quality and attractive aluminum finish. Easy disassembly. Cooling fan can be disabled. No software required for Macs. Hardware RAID controller.Cons: Expensive. SATA interface limits read/write speeds. Only 27W of power delivery.Bottom Line: With its wealth of ports, the Akitio Thunder3 RAID Station is both a connectivity hub and a capacious external hard drive for multimedia content creators.Read ReviewBuffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC Review
MSRP: $129.99Pros: Built-in USB cable. Ruggedized. Dust and water resistant. Hardware encryption. Mac and PC format utility.Cons: NFC card is easy to lose. Doesn't unlock via smartphones.Bottom Line: The 1-terabyte Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC has a built-in cable you can't lose, a rugged chassis that will survive a rough daily commute, and an NFC card and reader add some security to this portable hard drive.Read ReviewSamsung Portable SSD X5 Review
MSRP: $699.99Pros: Extremely fast data transfer speeds, thanks to Thunderbolt 3 and PCIe NVMe interfaces. Multiple capacity options. Sleek design.Cons: Expensive. Heavy. No USB support. Difficult to connect to Windows PCs.Bottom Line: 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.Read ReviewWestern Digital My Passport Wireless SSD Review
MSRP: $499.00Pros: Durable. Built-in SD card reader and USB port. Plex support. Doubles as a power bank.Cons: Expensive. No Thunderbolt support.Bottom Line: The Western Digital My Passport Wireless SSD is pricey, but this feature-packed drive can do much more than just wirelessly transfer files.Read Review
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Storage has never been more plentiful or less expensive.
Agree?
By spending as little as $50 on HDD you can add a terabyte to your laptop or desktop to store a ton of games, movies, MP3s and photos.
The only problem is choosing the best external hard drive,
In this ultimate guide, I have shortlisted four top-rated external hard drives to help you discover the top portable hard drive for yourself.
Our Top 4 External Hard Drives
Fastest(For Mac) | Portable(For Xbox One) | Reliable(For PC) | Strongest(For PS4) |
Best External Hard Drives 2019
Dive into these HDD reviews to pick the best ideal and most reliable storage drive for you.
1. Western Digital 4TB My Passport – Best External Hard Drive For Mac
I bought the WD My Passport 2TB back in 2017 and guess what? I just love the transfer speed and it’s still working fine for me.
Every hard drive offers great storage capacity but what makes WD My Passport different from others is faster data transfer speeds.
This is the latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport range of data storage and weighs about eight ounces with a compact size like a passport and easy to carry in hand.
If you are a professional photographer, programmer or IT guru you can take fast backup of all of your data including photos and files within seconds regardless of the files size.
Best watermarking for mac. But don’t limit yourself if you want to use the drive for personal usage like storing games, movies or pictures as I did.
This smallest and lightest hard disk uses a single cable for power supply as well as for data transfer. Equipped with a blue light which indicates by illuminating when the device is active.
The drive becomes much safe due to four rubber feet in case of impact on any surface.
Furthermore, WD reduced the carbon footprints by using recycled materials for the casing. Though it’s made up of plastic it’s much durable.
Available in different colors giving you the freedom to choose your desired color with desired storage capacity as WD is available in 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB versions with varying prices.
You don’t want to miss the next part…
Its simplicity makes it a terrific product. It brings a SmartWare software which presents are two separate devices when plugged in, one drive with external storage space and one drive with factory-loaded software.
The intuitive visual interface makes it simple to transfer all your data and files to the drive and free up necessary hard-disk space. With the built-in software, easy installation and management of settings can be done.
WD My Passport is small, lightweight, fast, reliable and inexpensive. When plugged in with MAC or PC you will be served with outstanding performance, thanks to a 3.0 USB port and excellent disk controller.
This solid performer offers a maximum transfer speed of 174 MBps (Megabytes per second) read and 168 MBps write(You can see the screenshot below).
Now, this is important…
You get the option to set up incremental backups every time you connect the drive with your computer or with any other device, thanks to Backup and retrieval options.
No more headache for the data deleted from My Passport as it can be easily retrieved including older versions of files.
Furthermore, WD features cloud storage and offers password protection using 256-bit data encryption. It cannot compete for the top speeds of solid-state drives but easily beats well-known traditional HDDs. It also comes with WD SmartWare software allowing you to control the drive easily.
So best companion to use with the computer on the plane, in the car, on vacation, and at home.
Reasons why we recommend it:
- Huge storage capacity
- Fast transfer speeds
- Reliable storage
- Affordable Price
2. Toshiba Canvio Basics 1TB: Best External Hard Drive For Xbox One
Best Mac Compatible External Hard Dri…
Looking for the best portable drive to extend your storage? The Toshiba Canvio Basics is the best 1TB Portable Hard Disk Drive for Xbox One and PC. It’s slightly bigger in size from the deck of cards.
Best Portable Hard Drive
It’s equipped with USB 3.0 ports and offers 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB models and ready to use straight out of the box just requires plugging into your PC via it’s USB 3.0 port using a USB cord. You can also use this it for MAC and perform a reformat to make it OS X-compatible.
Minutes to transfer the data depends on the size of data, You will find the files transferred pretty quickly even for the largest amount of data. It’s backward compatible means it can work perfectly with USB 2.0 technology.
Offering rotational speeds of 5400 RPM and comes with an internal shock sensor and ramp loading technology which this technology helps to keep your files safe.
If you want to transfer a bunch of pictures and videos from PC to the drive then Canvio Basics 1TB is the most suitable option which allows you to easily store photos and data files as well as other tons of storage with Much faster transfer speeds.
Cnet Best Portable Hard Drive
3. Seagate Expansion 1TB USB 3.0 – Most Reliable External Hard Drive
Best Portable Hard Drive For Mac
Seagate Expansion 1TB Portable is the best choice for small business owners and video editors and media professionals. They need large capacity which can copy RED footage, project files, and music files quickly and can be owned in few bucks rather than spending a dime.
Compared with traditional spinning drives which take 30 minutes to an hour for transferring 100 or so gigabytes of footage, Seagate Expansion with great>
Contents
- 1 Our Top 4 External Hard Drives
- 2 Best External Hard Drives 2019