10 BEST EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES FOR MAC ARCHIVE
10 BEST EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES FOR MAC PLUS

Our reviewer, Andy, calls out that some of the drive's durability is reliant on a detachable silicon seal over the Thunderbolt port, which is easy to forget when you're walking out the door. With its distinctive rubber bumpers and brushed aluminum chassis, LaCie's Rugged 2TB drive offers drop resistance up to 5 feet, crush resistance that can withstand up to a 1-ton car, and IP54 water and dust resistance. LaCie Rugged 2TB Thunderbolt USB-C Review It's also a pretty speedy workhorse for an external HDD Yoona benched write and read speeds of 180MB/s and 186MB/s, respectively, and was able to move the 98GB of NBA 2K in an hour and seven minutes. In some ways, however, the bulk is a plus: a more spacious interior ultimately allows heat to dissipate faster.

Our tester found that at only two inches wide it was easily to accidentally bump and topple it on her desk. This thing is bulky - it weighs a hair over two pounds and measures out like a meaty book - but beware if you intend to use it upright. The 10TB model is not a throwaway purchase in terms of price, but represents a strong value in the realm of supplemental storage. That’s why products like Western Digital’s Elements drive are awesome. There’s a limited three-year warranty to back you up, but given the drive's resilience, you may never need it.įor documents, music, and a little light gaming, a 2TB hard drive is perfect, but storage needs can bubble in no time if you’re a heavier user, especially when you add 4K video to your bottomless nests of folders. In her testing, Yoona recorded read speeds as high as 421MB/s and write speeds of 429MB/s. No matter your use case, you’ll have blazing speeds thanks to its solid-state nature. This makes it a more niche option for those working in the field, or just to protect themselves from their own clumsiness.

10 BEST EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES FOR MAC ARCHIVE

The ADATA SD700’s storage capacity options top out at 1TB, which may not be ideal for those looking to archive a heavy assortment of multimedia.

10 BEST EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES FOR MAC PLUS

It looks a little wild with the rubber bumper, especially on the yellow model, but that’s key to an engineering job that resulted in IP68 water and dust resistance, plus shock protection from bad drops. Yoona tested ADATA's claim that it could withstand 4-foot drops, dumping it onto both hardwood and cement, and the drive showed no signs of scuffing or damage and no performance issues. This travel-ready external hard drive uses 3D NAND technology to pack tons of space into a small form factor that allows easy pocket entry and removal. Most hard drives only claim reliability and durability for mechanical operation over time, but ADATA’s SD700 SSD drive offers more substantial protection. Read on for our picks of the best external hard drives currently available. These drives are great for laptops too, which often suffer from limited data capacity and to which it's even more difficult to add more storage. In any of the above scenarios, an external hard drive is a perfect fix, especially if you're running out of internal space for drives. Ever wanted to put your complete music discography on a single drive, or backup that aging collection of DVDs still collecting dust on your shelf? Or maybe you want a digital home for all your personal videos and photos to live that, crucially, isn't always connected to the internet and therefore vulnerable? Maybe you just want to archive every game save you've ever made, or move all your old documents off drives that are currently in active use.

Given the huge capacity of some of these drives, they're also a great solution for backup. They're also portable, and one of the best ways to move huge archives of media, data, and other files, without having to wait hours for terabytes of data to slowly upload. A great external drive is an incredibly convenient way to add a huge amount of storage to an existing machine without having to pry open your case and tinker around in the internals. If you've never invested in one of the best external hard drives, they offer a range of advantages compared to their internal counterparts.

10 best external hard drives for mac