Available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1 and 2TB sizes. Shock-, water-, and dust-resistant. Comes with a carabiner hole. Features a compact and lightweight design. Boasts extremely fast data transfer speeds. This durable external hard drive is a good option for Mac users who prioritize fast transfer speeds.WD - My Passport for Mac 1TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive. To make your choice much easier, here listed the best portable hard drive for Mac. 1 540MB/s High-Speed Read Write Portable SSD External Hard Drive USB C.But the huge options makes Mac users perplexed to decide what to get and what not. Weighing the Need for Speed: Hard Drive or SSD?Ive done the usual steps to ensure they perform there best but they clearly.
![]() ![]() Best Hdd Install Any DriveTheir defining characteristic is the ability to swap drives in and out of their multi-bay chassis easily, so most provide quick access to the drive bays at the front of the device.Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). They're mostly intended for professional use in editing studios, surveillance control rooms, and the like. 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 bulkier than the first two categories, so big that you'll want to stick them under your desk or in a dedicated server closet. These larger models are more expensive but also much more capacious—think 16TB or more (in that case, populated by two 8TB drive mechanisms). 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 software that comes 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 more than one platter-based hard drive mechanism in the chassis. Most are roughly 5 inches tall and 2 inches wide. These are called generically "2.5-inch drives," though they are actually a smidge wider than that. Hard drive-based portables make use inside of the same kinds of platter-drive mechanisms used in laptops. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.)At the other end of the physical-size spectrum are portable drives. The storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. 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 data access can approximate the speeds of a basic 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. Need Redundancy or Extreme Speed? Consider a RAID-Enabled DriveIf you buy a larger desktop drive with two or more spinning platters, you'll almost certainly have the option to configure the drive as a RAID array using included software. Example: A $60 1TB (1,000GB) hard drive would run you about 6 cents per gigabyte, while an $80 2TB (2,000GB) drive would work out to about 4 cents per gigabyte. As a rule, portable drives get their power from the computer to which you connect them, through the interface cable, so there's no need for a wall outlet or a power cord/brick.The best way to gauge relative value among similar portable drives is to calculate the cost per gigabyte, dividing the cost of the drive in dollars by the capacity in gigabytes to see the relative per-gig price. These connection types are ever in flux, but these days, most external hard drives use a flavor of USB, or in rare cases, Thunderbolt.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. Which Interface Should You Look For?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. Some require you to sacrifice raw capacity for data redundancy, so you'll want to pay attention to the nuances of each level. Configure keyboard for dolphin emulator macUSB-C: What's the Difference?)You'll only see the speed benefits of Thunderbolt 3, however, if you have a drive that's SSD-based, or a multi-drive, platter-based desktop hard drive that is set up in a RAID array. (See our explainer Thunderbolt 3 vs. As a 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. This interface piggybacks on a USB Type-C connector (not all USB Type-C ports support Thunderbolt 3, though) and offers blazing peak throughput of up to 40GBps. USB ports are ubiquitous, and many external drives now come with cables with both rectangular USB Type-A connectors and oval-shaped USB Type-C ones to enable adapter-free connections to PCs that have only one type. Almost every recent drive we have reviewed supports USB, and the same goes for laptops and desktops. It tends to show up mainly in products geared toward the Mac market.A desktop hard drive with a single platter-based mechanism inside, or a portable hard drive, is far more likely to make use of plain old USB instead. Do You Need to Go Rugged?If you carry your drive around frequently, you'll want to pay attention to how rugged the drive is. (Also, that USB 2.0 port may not supply sufficient power to run the drive in the first place, so the speed shortfall may be moot.) Any remotely recent computer will have faster USB ports, though. The drive platters' own speed is the limiter, not the flavor of USB 3.The only case with hard drives where the USB standard matters much is if you connect a drive to an old-style, low-bandwidth USB 2.0 port, which is better reserved for items like keyboards and mice. All are inter-compatible, and you won't see a speed bump from one versus the other in the hard drive world. You don't have to worry about the differences among these three USB specs when looking at ordinary hard drives, though. Be mindful of that.In addition to their physical shape differences, USB ports on the computer side will variously support USB 3.0, 3.1, or 3.2, depending on the age of the computer and how up to date its marketing materials are.
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