- Best Overall: Seagate 2TB 7200RPM FireCuda. While hard drive capacity continues to get larger and larger every year, Seagate’s 2TB 7200RPM FireCuda 3.5 inch SATA drive offers more than enough space for music, video, and pictures.
- Finding the best external hard drive for your Mac can breathe new life into your workflow. Especially if you have a MacBook, iMac or Mac Mini, you may have limited internal upgrade options.
- Best external backup drive. No single hard drive today can surpass the throughput of USB 3.1 Gen 1, though. Unless you have an older Mac, there’s really no need to invest in a pricier.
- Best Backup Hard Drive For Mac 2018 Collections
- Best Backup Hard Drive For Mac 2018 Football
- Best Backup Hard Drive For Windows 10
- Best Backup Hard Drive Software
Anyone who uses a PC should have an external drive. It’s not only a useful means of data backup and storage, it also allows you to transport files from your desktop or laptop to another device.
Xbox One X users, as well, would be wise to invest in an external drive as a way of augmenting the console’s measly 1TB hard drive (the external drive needs to be USB 3.0-compatible and will be formatted when you insert the drive).
The best external drives 2019
Best for Mac Creative Work. The 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive hard drive has more features and double the storage for $50. Best External Hard Drives of 2018 Featured in This Roundup.
- WD My Passport 4TB: Best external backup drive [amazon.com]
- Samsung T5 SSD: Best external performance drive [amazon.com]
- Samsung Portable SSD X5: Best portable Thunderbolt 3 drive [samsung.com]
The question is, which external drive is right for you? To answer that, we’ve combed through our reviews of both external hard disks and SSDs to pick the top drives we’ve tested. We’ll also walk you through what you need to know to buy the best external drive for your needs.
Updated March 27, 2019 to add two reviews that put style on an equal footing with performance.
- The G-Technology G-Drive mobile USB-C external drive (available on Amazon) performs well, and G-Technology always delivers attractive designs that seem intended to harmonize with Apple products. Alas, along with the Apple design cues, comes an relatively Apple-like price. Read our full review.
- The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch (available on Amazon) is a svelte drive that sports an attractive basket-weave polyester fabric, as well as good benchmark results. The price is pretty affordable, too. Read our full review.
Best external backup drive
Lots of storage for less than the competition, attractive styling, and good performance with small files highlight this USB 3.0 portable hard drive. An excellent bargain.
Our pick for best portable external backup drive for 2017 is Western Digital’s My Passport 4TB drive. Although it’s a tick or two slower than other backup drives (like our runner-up, for example) in sequential file writing (think copying movie files), it does better at writing small files (think hundreds of Word or Excel documents.) It’s not flashy or super-fast, but for most people who only whip it out once a month to run backups and then shove it back into a drawer, those things don’t matter as much as the capacity, price, and reasonable performance. (Read our full review.)
Runner-up
If capacity and portability are your primary concerns, and the Backup Plus Portable fits up to 5TB in pretty much a standard 2.5-inch USB external package. It's fast with large files, but on the slow side with small ones. Regardless, it's a worthy drive that gives you more space for your movies and games.
Our runner-up for this popular category is Seagate’s slightly larger and somewhat faster Backup Plus Portable. Like the WD above, it’s a USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) drive. It tops out at 5TB in a single drive and can also be had in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. There’s even a “fast” 4TB version that uses two hard drives in RAID for more performance.
In our tests of the 4TB version, we found the Seagate to be slightly faster with large file transfers (think movies) but worse with small file transfers (think Office documents). It’s still a worthy runner-up, though. (Read our full review.)
Best performance USB drive
The T5 is easily the fastest non-RAID portable USB SSD we've tested. It makes full use of its Gen 2, 3.1 interface while retaining the svelte profile of the T3. A winner for sure.
Remember that scene in Office Space where Peter Gibbons is desperately trying to save files to disk before getting out of the office? Yeah, mmkay. If you need ultra-fast performance in a package that you can put in your pocket, look no further than Samsung’s new T5 . Not much larger than a book of matches, the T5 comes in sizes from 500GB to 2TB. The best part is its speed. The drive features a USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) over USB Type C.
And no, unlike most USB “thumb drives” this baby doesn’t hit the wall when writing files. It can write 20GB of files in just 110 seconds. If it’s a single large file, it’ll write it in 58 seconds. (Read our full review.)
The Extreme Portable SSD's convenient form factor trumps the drive's slight performance deficit compared to the Samsung T5. With its fast USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) capability, this is currently our favorite portable SSD.
Runner-up
The new drive here is the runner-up, which some may consider an even better pick than the Samsung T5: The Sandisk Extreme Portable. You can read our review of it here, where we give it 4.5 stars and an Editor’s Choice Award. It’s a seriously fast USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) drive, just not quite as fast as the Samsung T5.
You might still choose it instead of the Samsung T5 because it’s more comfortable with its rubberized grip finish. It comes with a nifty combo cable that adapts to old-school square USB Type A and also works with USB-C ports.
The Sandisk Extreme Portable displaces the Sandisk Extreme 900 drive, but we think it’s a fair decision because the Extreme 900 is, well, pricey. At $700 for 1.92TB, it’s hard to justify over the Extreme Portable’s $521 for 2TB.
Best portable Thunderbolt 3 drive
Best Backup Hard Drive For Mac 2018 Collections
Portable Thunderbolt 3 drives have been long overdue, but we’re happy to recommend Samsung’s new Portable SSD X5 drive. The full review is on our sister site Macworld, but let’s just say it’s stupidly fast and kinda like putting a scorching Samsung 970 Pro in an enclosure that fits in your pocket and not giving up much performance at all.
Notice that we don’t say “best portable performance Thunderbolt 3 drive,” because by very definition, a Thunderbolt 3 drive should be blazingly fast. The only reason we’re not universally recommending the Portable SSD X5 is the relative rarity of Thunderbolt 3 ports on PCs. You’d need to be driving a brand-new Dell XPS 13 or HP Spectre x360 13 to be able to use Thunderbolt 3.
What you need to know before you buy
Capacity and price
External-drive shopping can pull you deep into specs and features, but the most important two numbers for consumers are capacity and price. Many assume the lowest-cost drive gets you the most value, but it often doesn’t. In fact, dollar for dollar, it’s often the worst deal.
For example, we took the WD Black My Passport portable drive and compared the prices of the 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB drive, on capacity and price. Keep in mind, this is one drive on one day (July 11, 2017), and just one vendor, Amazon, but it illustrates the point.
If you look at the chart above, you can see the worst deal is that $58 1TB HDD, while the 4TB nets the most storage capacity for the money. Here are the same numbers in a bar chart form:
So yes, if you’re buying an external drive, you pay more for the lowest capacity. However, this doesn’t mean you should automatically shell out for that 4TB drive. In the end, it still costs more. If you really don’t need the storage capacity of a 4TB drive, put that extra $57 toward something you actually do need.
Interface
The vast majority of drives today are USB drives. From there it gets confusing. Today, the flavors include: USB 3.0, USB SuperSpeed, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (which is basically USB 3.0), and USB 3.1 Gen 2.
For the most part, it doesn’t matter which of these versions you get (beware the much older USB 2.0, though). USB 3.0 allows transfer speeds up to 5Gbps, as does USB 3.1 Gen 1. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is the fastest USB version and can move data up to 10Gbps. No single hard drive today can surpass the throughput of USB 3.1 Gen 1, though. The sleight of hand to watch for is if a drive vendor lists “USB 3.1” in the specs without specifying Gen 1 or Gen 2.
The only place Gen 2 can help is with an SSD. The good news is that while USB 3.1 Gen 2 used to be only in crazy expensive SSD external drives, it’s fairly affordable today. A Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD that is our runner up for portable storage can be had for $125 in a 500GB capacity.
Ports
External drives come with a variety of confusing and esoteric ports. Here’s what you need to care about.
USB 3.0 Micro B port is the most common port on portable backup drives today. It’s basically the same Micro USB port used on your phone, but beefed up with more connectors to hit USB 3.0 speeds. It’ll hit 5Gbps and for everything but the fastest portable SSDs is still fine.
USB 3.0 Type B port is the larger, blocky version of USB 3.0 Micro B. USB 3.0 Type B is often used in larger external drive enclosures. As its name implies, it’ll hit USB 3.0 speeds at up to 5Gbps.
USB Type C is the newest of the USB connectors and features a nifty reversible design that’s being used on phones, tablets, and PCs. Its most important feature is that it supports up to 10Gbps transfer speeds. The key phrase here is “up to.” USB Type C is just the connector and port on the drive (or phone), but the rules allow USB Type C to support transfer speeds from USB 2.0’s 480Mbps to USB 3.0’s 5Gbps and USB 3.1’s 10Gbps. So don’t caught up thinking that because a drive you buy has this nifty new interface and port, you’ll get awesome speeds. And no, hooking up a hard drive to a USB Type C port doesn’t make anything faster.
Outside the theoretical speed advantage of USB Type C is a power advantage. A standard USB Type C port on your desktop or laptop should be able to support a minimum of 15 watts, so you should be able to run larger, more power-hungry drives.
Thunderbolt 3 was designed as one cable to rule them all, and it’s rapidly looking like it will. The port basically adopts a USB Type C port and connector but also offers the ability to run pure PCIe at up to 40Gbps. For the performance-minded, Thunderbolt 3 is the natural alternative. One negative, though: It ain’t cheap. Our recommended portable, the Samsung Portable SSD X5 is $697 for 1TB of capacity. A 1TB Samsung T5 on USB is only $278.
There’s no reason to pay extra for a Thunderbolt 3 drive unless it’s high-performance. A Thunderbolt 3 portable hard drive would be a complete waste of time and money for most people.
Thunderbolt 2 is, at this point, a dying port. Using a miniDisplayPort connector, it only really gained popularity on Macintosh PCs and is now being put out to pasture. Unless you have an older Mac, there’s really no need to invest in a pricier Thunderbolt 2 drive or port today unless it’s for legacy support issues.
eSATA is another mostly dead port. Made as an extension of SATA, eSATA was a cheap way to get beyond the 60MBps performance of USB 2.0. USB 3.0 put the last nail in its coffin, though, so you can ignore this port today. Like Thunderbolt 2, the only reason to invest in an eSATA drive is for use with older computers.
Buy two?
There’s an old saying that “one is none and two is one.” You can apply that phrase to space capsule oxygen tanks, plane engines, or whatever mission critical system you depend on, including hard drives.
The philosophy on external drives used for backup is that copying 10 years’ worth of photos onto an external drive and then erasing it on your PC’s local drive isn’t actually a backup at all. If that drive gets chewed up by the dog or otherwise dies, you’ve lost it all.
If you’re paranoid about backups, consider getting two backup drives, possibly in different colors, and then alternating complete backups of your PC to the drives every few month. This should mitigate data loss should a drive die. Truly paranoid people will even take the second drive to work so there’s no chance of losing both drives to the same local disaster.
How we tested
We use our standard storage test bed to evaluate the performance of the drives we review. It’s an Intel six-core Core i7-5820K on an Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard with a Thunderbolt 3 card and 32GB of RAM running Windows 8.1. We use various synthetic benchmarks including Crystal Disk Mark 5, AS SSD, and Iometer. We also use a manual file-copy test where 20GB of small files and another 20GB single file are written to and read from the storage drive. The test bed boots to a plain SATA drive, but all targets and sources for drive performance use a 24GB RAM disk.
We also use an Asus Thunder EX3 discrete Thunderbolt 3 card and Asus USB 3.1 10Gbps card for testing. The Asus card uses an Asmedia 1142 controller.
Our external drive reviews
If you’d like to learn more about our top picks as well as other options, you can find links below to all the external drives we’ve reviewed. We’ll keep evaluating new ones on a regular basis, so be sure to check back to see what other drives we’ve put through their paces.
Finding the best external hard drive for your Mac can breathe new life into your workflow. Especially if you have a MacBook, iMac or Mac Mini, you may have limited internal upgrade options. Adding an external hard drive can increase your storage by orders of magnitude, giving you ample room for backups, movie collections, music libraries, ongoing projects and more.
Regardless of whether you will be storing personal memories or files from work, choosing the right Mac external hard drive is vital to protecting your digital valuables. With that in mind, what features are most important in an external hard drive? What are some of the hard drives currently available for your Mac?
Contents
Top 6 External Hard Drives for Mac
| WD My Book 3TB | Seagate 2TB USB 3.0 Backup Plus Slim Portable | LaCie Porsche Design P'9233 3TB | WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo 8TB | Silicon Power Armor A60 | |
| Rank | #1 - Editor's Choice | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 |
| Amazon Rating | |||||
| Capacity | 3 TB | 2 TB | 3 TB | 8 TB | 1 TB |
| Architecture | Magnetic hard drive | Magnetic Hard Drive | Magnetic Hard Drive | Magnetic Hard Drive | Magnetic Hard Drive |
| Filesystem | HFS+ | HFS+ | HFS+ | HFS+ | Unformatted |
| Connectivity | USB 3.0 | USB 3.0 | USB 3.0 | Thunderbolt | USB 3.0 |
| Weight | 2.23 lb | 4.8 oz | 2.3 lb | 5.1 lb | 8 oz |
| Time Machine Support | |||||
| Special Features | Hardware encryption | Free 200GB OneDrive Storage | Automatic Eco Mode | RAID Support | Shockproof and Waterproof |
| Price | $109 | $119 | $139 | $576 | $58 |
| Buy Now | Buy Now | Buy Now | Buy Now | Buy Now |
#1 Pick WD My Book 3TB
WD My Book Duo Hard Drive, a top hard drive for mac.
The Western Digital My Book (model: WDBFJK0030HBK) for Mac 3TB hard drive offers a good balance of storage, features and speed. With 3TB of storage, the drive is HFS+ formatted out-of-the-box, ensuring compatibility with OS X. It is fully compatible with Time Machine and uses USB 3.0 for its connectivity, ensuring fairly fast I/O. Unfortunately, Western Digital does not advertise the speed at which the drive spins. It can be found as cheap as $109.
#2 Pick Seagate 2TB USB 3.0 Backup Plus Slim Portable Hard Drive
Seagate Backup Plus Slim Hard Drive, is portable and a top pick for your Mac.
The Seagate Backup Plus Slim (model: STDR2000102) is designed for users on the go. Its slim profile can easily be fit in virtually any computer bag. Like the My Book, the Backup Plus Slim uses USB 3.0, but also has wireless syncing for mobile devices. iOS and Android devices can sync via WiFi with the accompanying backup app. Users even receive 200GB of free Microsoft OneDrive storage for two years. In spite of having 2TB, rather than the My Book’s 3TB, the Backup Plus Slim retails for $119. Users will need to determine if the extra features are worth the reduced storage and higher price.
#3 Pick LaCie Porsche Design P’9233 3TB Hard Drive
LaCie Porsche Design P’9233 3TB, a beautifully designed hard drive to complement your Mac.
In 2003 LaCie and Porsche teamed up to create a hard drive. The P’9233 (model: 9000302) continues that tradition, offering a combination of performance, portability and sleek looks. The case is made from sleek, rugged aluminum, ensuring it matches with your MacBook or MacBook Pro. Like the other top contenders, the P’9233 comes formatted for OS X and is fully compatible with Time Machine. The 3TB model is available for $139, with more expensive models reaching up to 8TB of storage.
#4 Pick WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo w/TB Cable 8TB Hard Drive
The WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo provide massive storage and exceptional looks.
When it comes to top-of-the-line performance and storage, it’s hard to beat the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo. Unlike the other drives, this external drive relies on Thunderbolt to handle I/O. While this restricts its usage to the last couple of generations of Macs, those machines that have Thunderbolt ports will see significant speed improvements over USB 3 or competing technologies. The Thunderbolt interface also allows the drive to be daisy-chained with other devices, while the 8TB of storage should satisfy even the most data-hungry user. All this comes at a price, however, with the My Book Thunderbolt Duo coming in at $576.
#5 Pick Silicon Power Armor A60 External Hard Drive
The Silicon Power Armor A60 Shockproof Hard Drive is tough and practical.
The Silicon Power Armor A60 is an extremely rugged external hard drive that offers military-grade shockproof and waterproof performance. This USB 3.0 hard drive is ideal for on-the-go and outdoor use, and is available in both 1TB and 2TB configurations. The drive can be found for $58 and $97 respectively. We think this as one of the best portable external hard drives for macs.
#6 Pick Transcend 1TB Thunderbolt SSD
A bit pricey, but fast and realiable, the Transcend 1TB Thunderbolt Solid State Drive makes our list of top hard drives for Mac.
The Transcend 1TB Thunderbolt offers the very best in performance, combining an SSD with Thunderbolt connectivity. It also includes USB 3.0 for machines that may not have Thunderbolt, and comes pre-formatted for HFS+. The performance comes at a premium, however, with the Transcend 1TB listed at $1,199, although it can be found for $590.
Things to Look for in Top Hard Drive
Ruggedness is less important for a hard drive that will stay on your desk and rarely, if ever, leave the home or office. If, on the other hand, your hard drive will accompany you wherever you go, then ruggedness becomes a critical factor in your decision.
Speed is another factor to consider. The speed you require will depend largely on what you will be using the hard drive for. If you’ll be using it primarily for backups, a slower 5,400RPM drive should suffice. If you will be using it for more intensive tasks, such as editing video or audio files, a 7,200RPM or solid-state drive (SSD) would be a better choice.
Warranty: While virtually all hard drive manufacturers offer a warranty, not all warranties are created equal. Lengths, terms and what is covered vary from one manufacturer to another. Hopefully you will not have any issues with your new drive. If you do, however, a longer, more comprehensive warranty may be worth an additional upfront cost.
Features to Look For
Connectivity
- The most important part of any external hard drive is the mechanism by which it connects to your computer. Without the right I/O, the best hard drive in the world is little more than a paperweight.
- If you have the Retina MacBook, Apple’s newest portable that only has one USB-C port, you’ll need a hard drive that supports USB-C, or a USB-C adapter.
- Other Macs ship with a combination of USB, Thunderbolt and FireWire ports, giving you the option to choose the interface that’s best for you.
- For example, Thunderbolt offers transfer speeds in the neighborhood of 10Gbps, while USB 3.0 and FireWire 800 offer speeds of 5Gbps and 800 Mbps respectively. This makes Thunderbolt the obvious choice for data intensive operations where speed is of paramount importance, while USB 3.0 is more widely used with a greater variety of available devices.
Network Support
- Many modern external hard drives offer built-in wireless support.
- This can be a convenient alternative to the various I/O methods, allowing you to access the drive and transfer files over WiFi.
- Still other external hard drives go a step further by providing the ability to create a mobile hotspot, making it easy for connected devices to access files and stream data and videos from the external drive.
Portability
- Another significant factor when considering an external hard drive is the portability of the unit. By their nature, all external hard drives offer a degree of portability. The degree, however, depends on the model.
- Some models offer sleek, slim lines that, while visually appealing, may not offer the rugged mobility you may require. Others, while bulkier, may offer greater padding and shock absorption.
- Will you be using the drive primarily at your desk? Or will the drive travel with you outside of the home or office? Another consideration is whether you need power. How long will you be using the drive on-the-go? If you plan on using it for an extended period, one with an internal battery may be you best option.
Time Machine Compatibility
- Time Machine is Apple’s automatic backup solution, keeping multiple revisions of your files. It “makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. The oldest backups are deleted when your backup drive is full.”
- To get the most of any external hard drive, it needs to be one that supports Time Machine.
Drive Architecture
- The architecture of the drive is another important consideration, one which will have a direct bearing on performance, ruggedness and cost.
- For decades the default hard drive mechanism was a spinning, magnetic platter, or disk. As hard drive capacities increased over time, limitations in the capacity of a single platter led to multiple platters being paired together to act as a single drive.
- While this allows hard drives to offer terabytes worth of storage, the more platters a hard drive contains the more complicated they become, and the greater the theoretical risk of corruption or failure.
- In recent years, SSDs have come into wider use. Unlike traditional drives, SSDs are based on flash memory, giving them faster performance. Because they have no moving parts, they are more rugged, less prone to shock damage and are generally more reliable.
- The cost of manufacturing SSDs, however, makes them a more expensive option than traditional hard drives and they currently do not offer the same capacity.
Drive Performance
- Traditional hard drives offer a range of performance, measured in RPMs.
- The most common options are 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM.
- Drives spinning at 7,200 RPM will be faster at both read and write operations, but may come at a premium price compared to their 5,400RPM counterparts. The higher speed may also come at the cost of power consumption, making 5,400RPM drives a more appealing option for mobile drives that have their own battery power supply.
Best Backup Hard Drive For Mac 2018 Football
Which External Mac Hard Drive Should You Choose
As with many tech decisions, the choice of hard drive ultimately comes down to your needs. That and information. That’s why we’ve done the hard work and Mac external hard drive reviews. For home and home office users, the WD My Book for Mac 3TB offers one of the best balances of performance, storage and price. Given that current iMacs are shipping with 1TB drives, this option provides plenty of room for backups and future growth.
Best Backup Hard Drive For Windows 10
The most demanding of users will be best served by the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo. With its Thunderbolt connectivity, 8TB of storage and ability to be daisy-chained with other drives or devices, this external hard drive is ideal for professionals, such as videographers, whose livelihood depends on being able to work with large files as quickly as possible.
Best Backup Hard Drive Software
Those who work in rugged environments, or who simply don’t want to worry about their external hard drive, would do well to consider the Silicon Power Armor A60.