External Hard Drives Allow Storage For Mac
Sep 20, 2018 - Expand your Mac the easy way, and give yourself the perfect place for Time Machine backups. Shop for Mac external hard drives at Best Buy. Compare and read customer reviews to purchase the Apple hard drive that fits your needs. Hard Drives, SSD & Storage; Mac External Hard Drives. Categories & Filters. Hard Drive Size. WD - My Passport for Mac 1TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive with Hardware Encryption - Black.
This is why the external hard drive market has grown rapidly over the past decade with hundreds of different options for your Mac. So it is important to know what features matter more than others, what drives fit your needs more and whether they can connect to your Mac at all. Where to start looking for the best external drive for Mac? First of all, what will you store on this drive?
If you’ll us it for just documents, pictures, music, or other media files, go for a Hard Disk Drive (HDD). If you’re planning on installing programs, storing games or super-high definition content on your external hard drive, a Solid-State Drive (SSD) may be a better choice. The main are capacity, transfer speeds, and price. HDDs can hold multiple TB of information but transfer it to your Mac more slowly. On the flipside, SSDs are on average a bit smaller but will transfer the required information super-fast. SSDs are also more expensive because of the more advanced electronic systems that can ensure the higher transfer speeds.
When it comes to smaller files, however, this speed difference is very small, since pictures, documents, etc. Already load quickly, while cutting game or program loading times in half may be a huge deal.
Related articles. USB USB is the most popular computer interface, with pretty much any Mac, PC or laptop having at least a couple USB ports.
USB 3.0 is the latest version of the interface, with USB 3.1 gen 2 providing the fastest transfer speeds (up to 10Gb/s). Such bandwidth will be enough to let you use any external HDD or SSD to its maximum potential. The USB interface is also backward compatible, meaning that a USB 3.0 hard drive will also work with a USB 2.0 port, however, the older port may slow the drive down. The ubiquity combined with the high performance of USB 3.0 make it the best choice for an external hard drive for Mac. Thunderbolt Thunderbolt is the fastest interface as of now at 40Gb/s max per port for Thunderbolt 3.
You may also have either a Thunderbolt 1 or 2 port, which provide 10Gb/s and 20Gb/s accordingly. Overall the Thunderbolt port can provide faster data transfer and lets you connect multiple devices to one port. However, it is much less popular than USB, so if you use your external hard drive on different devices, you may very well run into one that doesn’t support Thunderbolt. Plus, no external SSDs, not to mention HDDs don’t even come close to using all the bandwidth. ESATA is also an option for an external drive interface, however, this port only transfers data, so you need an extra cable for power.
Not to mention the fact that the 6Gb/s bandwidth is absolutely destroyed by Thunderbolt and the latest iterations of USB 3.0. This is why eSATA is going out of fashion real quick, along with the slow Firewire ports. Overall, USB is more universal, while Thunderbolt could provide more speed if you want to connect multiple devices to it.
Otherwise, the huge speed advantage just goes to waste and you’re left with a less ubiquitous connector. Picking and installing your external hard drive on Mac When you’ve figured out what type of external drive to go for and what connectors your Mac can support, it’s on to browsing lists of the best external hard drives and balancing your funds with performance.
Here are a couple top lists to choose from. Once you’ve bought an external hard drive, it’s on to installing it for the first time. This requires formatting – a process that prepares the drive to work with designated operating systems. Your drive may also come pre-formatted, however, there is no need to overpay for this luxury, as the formatting process is rather simple. Check out our.
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Once your Mac external hard drive is formatted, you can use it the same way as your internal hard drive. Alternatives for external storage for Mac Depending on your needs and conditions, you can resort to other solutions, which may save you some money. Flash drives are one if you need to store only documents or not too many media files on an external, portable device.
Flash drives, however, are very small when compared to hard drives, with the largest consumer-grade flash drives being around half a terabyte. Internal hard drive docks and are also an option, letting you pick between internal drives as well as external ones. Hard drive docks are stationary systems that let you easily dock your internal hard drive and connect it to whatever port the dock provides, making it a handy desktop solution. Hard drive enclosures allow you to basically make your own external hard drive by inserting into a sturdier case that will protect it. While this makes the drive choosing process more flexible, enclosures are not as sturdy as pre-built external hard drives that are made to endure mechanical shock. If you do decide to go for a dock or enclosure solution, make sure you get an internal drive of the right form factor (essentially size) – most notable here would be either 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives.
See to find out how enclosures are used.
Mac Compatible External Hard Drive
Apple's photo management software for the Mac, has grown to be a fairly competent all-purpose storage locker. But as your photo and video library grows — and especially if you've taken advantage of — you may find that your Photos library strains to fit on your Mac's hard drive. While there are options to keep your Mac from running out of space, like if you use iCloud Photo Library, it comes at a cost: Without a fully-stored Photos library, you won't be able to create secondary. (And as good as iCloud has become, your photos and video are precious enough that they're worth keeping backed up in multiple places.) There is an alternative: Moving your Photos library to an external drive (or creating an entirely separate library and syncing it with iCloud). Here's how to do it, and some reasons why you should — and shouldn't! — consider it for your needs.