Best portable external hard drive for mac

#Best portable external hard drive for mac how to#
#Best portable external hard drive for mac Pc#

Then, all the names changed: not once, but twice. Then you had USB 3.1, offering speeds up to 10Gbits/sec and USB 3.2 delivering speeds up to 20Gbits/sec. It offered a theoretical transfer rate of up to 5Gbits/sec (with real-world speeds closer to 300MB/sec). This is a more complicated question than it should be, thanks in the main to the USB standards body's inability to stick to a single, simple naming scheme. What kind of connectivity should I look for? Transfers that used to take ten or 20 minutes suddenly happen in a minute or less.

And with read speeds anywhere between 500MB/sec and a staggering 2.4GB/sec (with the right connectivity - see below), youвЂ™ll be amazed how fast these things can go.

#Best portable external hard drive for mac Pc#

SSDs are small and extremely robust, which makes them great for moving media libraries or big projects between PCs or transferring Steam games from your PC to your laptop. You still wonвЂ™t get a whole lot of storage without spending major money but if you want something that can hold, say, 500GB of video or photos, you can find something fast and relatively affordable for a reasonable amount of money these days.Д«est monitor 2022: Top displays for home office and gaming

Should I buy an SSD?Д®xternal SSDs used to be prohibitively expensive but a highly competitive market is now bringing the price right down. You can easily find 6TB drives for under ВЈ100 and 10TB for around ВЈ200. To make up for this, youвЂ™ll often get better performance with drives that spin at speeds of up to 7,200rpm and a larger cache to make file transfers smoother. These use larger 3.5in hard disks and require a dedicated power supply, which makes them less convenient. If you need more space, youвЂ™ll need to look at desktop drives. You can even find 5TB drives for less than ВЈ100. You can easily pick up a 1TB drive for under ВЈ50 and a 2TB drive for around ВЈ20 more. The latest USB standards deliver transfer speeds that are plenty fast enough for most, so the biggest bottleneck will be the performance of the HDD contained within the housing. These feature 2.5in, 5,400rpm drives of the sort we used to see in laptops, housed in a toughened casing and using a single USB connection for both power and data transfer. Today, external drives come in three basic forms, the biggest and most popular category of which is the portable HDD.

#Best portable external hard drive for mac how to#

READ NEXT: The best external hard drives for PS4 | The best external hard drives for Xbox One How to choose the best external hard drive for you What type of drive should I buy? Whatever your needs, whatever your budget, weвЂ™ve got the right external storage for you. WeвЂ™ve picked out some of the best external drives вЂ“ both SSD and HDD вЂ“ to cover all requirements, including desktop models, slimline portables and matchbox-sized SSDs. Even a basic USB 3 or 3.2 Gen 1 drive will be fast enough for most purposes, while you can pair the latest USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 and 4 SSDs with a laptop that supports them and get enough speed for 4K video editing or gaming. TheyвЂ™re cheap, capacious and increasingly speedy вЂ“ and all you need to do is plug them in. This isnвЂ™t just hitting PC gamers, but also the console crowd.Д®xternal HDDs and SSDs are the answer. Gamers get it even harder вЂ“ weвЂ™re seeing some big titles demanding more than 100GB, with some getting closer to 200GB. High-res audio files, 4K videos and 20-megapixel photos can quickly fill the average laptopвЂ™s 256GB SSD, and if youвЂ™re working on a project or holding on to your music files and photos, youвЂ™ll soon run out of space. Laptops and PCs keep getting smaller and lighter, but storage space has never seemed so tight вЂ“ which is why you need the best external hard drive you can afford.