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2TB to 36TB From 219.00 Enclosure From 99.00.This durable external hard drive is a good option for Mac users who prioritize fast transfer speeds. USB 3.1 Gen 1/USB 3.0 + FireWire 800 Ports. Dual-drive hardware RAID storage solution with fast USB 3 + FW800 connectivity. Weighing the Need for Speed: Hard Drive or SSD?OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual with USB 3.1 Gen 1 + FW800.

A 2TB SSD, though? Expect to pay at least two to three times as much as you would for that 2TB hard drive. You can find a 2TB portable hard drive with ease (possibly even a 4TB one, depending on the day) for less than $100. Larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still almost exclusively use spinning-drive mechanisms, taking advantage of platter drives' much higher capacities and much lower prices compared with SSDs.And portable hard drives can be a great value if what you need is raw capacity above all else. Because there is no spinning platter or moving magnetic head, if you bump the SSD while you're accessing its data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable.Still, while external SSDs are cheaper than they were a few years ago (see the best we've tested at the preceding link), they're far from a complete replacement for spinning drives. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature-length film, or a year's worth of family photos) to an external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning drive.Not only is it faster to read and write data stored in flash cells, but it's also safer.

(Of course, in this scenario, your files are going to have to stay at your desk.)A desktop drive with a single platter mechanism inside will typically use a 3.5-inch drive inside and comes in capacities up to 12TB, though a few 16TB single drives in external chassis have started to emerge. We define these as having one or more spinning-platter drives inside and requiring a dedicated power cable plugged into AC power to work. In that case, your best option is a desktop-class hard drive. Physical Size Matters: Get a Desktop Drive, or a Portable One?If you have a large media-file collectionвЂ”perhaps you are a photo or video editor, or maybe a movie buffвЂ”you'll likely need several terabytes of space in which to store it.

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 capaciousвЂ”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.

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 DASвЂ”for 'direct attached storage'вЂ”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. Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. Their 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).

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. Hit the link above for an explanation of the traits and strengths of each RAID level. 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.

USB-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. ( Thunderbolt 4 is emerging here in 2021, but drives that use it and PCs that support it are not yet common.) All late-model Apple MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops have them, and many high-end Windows 10 laptops do, too.

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If the drive includes only a single cable, you may need an adapter, depending on your computer's available USB ports. 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.

Fast External Hard Drive For Mac