3.The price of an external storage drive is tied to a few factors: the amount of storage capacity you’re looking for, how fast the drive is at transferring your files, and its physical size.File export and import between USB drive and mobile devices. If you want to make use of your Mac's Thunderbolt port, then. Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt external hard drive. This is the latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport. Western Digital My Passport 4TB external hard drive. Best external hard drives for Mac: How we chose them 1.
The Best Hard Drives Portable Hard DriveBut those who are looking for something smaller, particularly a more travel-friendly USB-C drive that doesn’t compromise on storage capacity or speed, have a few different roads to take. This is a great option for some, especially if lugging it around isn’t a big deal, or you rarely feel the need to unplug it. With a huge range of sizes from the best brands, find the portable hard drive that suits you.At this point, high-capacity external drives that require power adapters are surprisingly inexpensive. The perfect storage solution for families you can easily back-up the home computer and keep files and precious memories safe.This means that you’ll need to determine the USB interface of the drive you’re interested in, then compare it to your computer’s USB-C port.USB interfaces are confusing as is, and with USB 3.2 set to launch later in 2019, the classifications listed below will change. You also need to make sure that the macOS or Windows 10 machine that you’ll connect it to can take advantage of its speed. What you should know before buying a USB-C SSDUnlike the buying process for most tech products, simply choosing the one that you think fits your workflow or budget isn’t the end of the road — or at least, it shouldn’t be.USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 3 support up to 40Gbps bandwidthThe ports themselves are backwards compatible, so a Thunderbolt 3 port will work just fine with drives that use the slower interfaces. USB-C ports with USB 3.1 Gen 2 support up to 10Gbps bandwidth USB-C ports with USB 3.1 Gen 1 support up to 5Gbps bandwidth As is the case with most computing components, your rig is only as fast as your slowest part.These bottlenecks became apparent in the course of my testing. If you have a SATA drive (as many Windows laptops do), it may have a hard time keeping up with a fast external drive. However, the transfer speed of an external drive lives and dies based on what the storage type inside of your computer is capable of. This might seem trivial, since you’re shopping for an external drive, not a replacement for your internal drive. If your computer has a Thunderbolt 3 port, it will work with non-Thunderbolt 3 devices, but conversely, the $450 X5 won’t work at all on a USB-C port that doesn’t support Thunderbolt 3.For this comparison, I tested a 1TB Thunderbolt 3 external SSD, a 1TB USB 3.1 Gen 2 external SSD, and a 1TB NVMe SSD that I installed into a USB 3.1 Gen 2 external enclosure.As if it weren’t complicated enough, you’ll also need to determine the type of storage that’s inside of your computer. For instance, plugging a USB 3.1 Gen 2 drive with a laptop that can only handle USB 3.1 Gen 1 will work, but it’s a recipe that will churn out disappointment, not fast transfer speeds. Any other passion or profession will benefit from the X5’s speeds, too, but at half the cost of many laptops, this is the best fit for those who regularly deal with large file transfers.Samsung advertises a maximum transfer rate of 2,800MB/s read, 2,300MB/s write, and the MacBook Pro that I tested on came close to meeting those claims. This kind of drive is ideal for video producers who need to minimize the time between exporting and moving huge 4K video files to a drive, or even intend to use it as a working scratch disk. Its design attributes to the cost, sure, but this drive’s main selling point is its Thunderbolt 3 data transfer speeds. Though, compared to the flash-based storage used in a 2016 MacBook Pro, another test machine that we used, the SATA-based storage in the Stealth had a significant negative impact on the maximum transfer speeds we saw from the X5 Thunderbolt 3 drive.USB-C SSD performance comparison Comparison1,800MB/s read, 1,800MB/s write (when installed directly into motherboard)Observed maximum transfer rate on macOS (sequential)2,410MB/s read, 1,708MB/s write on averageObserved maximum transfer rate on Windows 10 (sequential)Time to transfer 13GB file from MacBook ProTime to transfer 13GB file from drive to MacBook ProTime to transfer 13GB file from Razer Blade StealthTime to transfer 13GB file from drive to Razer Blade StealthSamsung’s X5 Thunderbolt 3 solid state drive currently costs $449 and proudly wears its premium status with an enclosure that’s fashioned like a sports car. Change default font for table of figures in word macThe two that I tried out come from Plugable ( currently $49) and ElecGear ( currently $45). Faster NVMe drives, such as Samsung’s popular 970 EVO Plus, cost a lot more money and you won’t get any benefit from using them in a USB 3.1 external enclosure.Best for people who don’t mind a DIY project, and who also don’t want to spend over $200 on a fast SSDEven though they are still relatively new, there are plenty of NVMe enclosures to choose from. The 660p drive that we tested is rated at 1,800MB/s for both read and write speeds, which isn’t the fastest you can get but is fast enough to saturate a USB 3.1 Gen 2 connection. Maximum transfer speeds can vary even among NVMe drives, but if your goal is to use it as an external drive, you don’t need to buy the fastest ones available because you won’t be able to use all of their bandwidth. I tested out Intel’s 660p M.2 NVMe PCIe 1TB SSD ( currently $110) with an enclosure, which has a few perks over the Samsung T5: it’s a bit cheaper, faster, and lastly, it’s a fun little project to put one of these together.There are a couple of different types of drives in the M.2 format (which refers to the drive’s physical size), and you’ll want to make sure you’re buying an NVMe PCIe drive, not a SATA-based one. It took only an average of nine seconds to transfer a 13GB file from the MacBook Pro to the X5.While the X5 and T5 are pre-built and ready to go right out of the box, building your own external drive using an M.2 NVMe SSD and an enclosure can produce some surprising results. Thunderbolt 3 enclosures, which do have the potential to take advantage of the fastest NVMe drives, are just now starting to hit the market, but they are significantly more expensive than USB 3.1 Gen 2 models. That’s less than the Samsung T5 costs, and thanks to the 660p’s fast read and write speeds, it’ll outperform it as well. Depending on the enclosure that you purchase, the total cost is around $160. On macOS, I saw an average of 17 seconds for the 13GB file transfer, a roughly 41 percent improvement over the T5’s time. Using the Blackmagic Design disk benchmark, I got an average of 933MB/s read, 910MB/s write on the macOS laptop, while Razer’s put up slightly faster numbers with the Novabench and ATTO benchmark tools: 961MB/s read, 942MB/s write, on average.Regarding the file transfer speed, this DIY NVMe drive shows decent improvements over Samsung’s similarly priced T5 SSD. Once you’re done with that, it works just like the T5 and is compatible with the same broad array of USB-C and USB-A ports.The results from the MacBook Pro and Razer Blade Stealth are mostly at parity with this drive. It’s still a plug-and-play affair on macOS, but Windows 10 won’t recognize this drive once connected you’ll have to install a partition on it and assign it a drive letter in the Disk Management setting before it can be used like a portable drive. Both enclosures I tested include these pads in the box.Getting this DIY drive up and running on your computer is a little different than the others that I tested. Since external SSD drives can generate a lot of heat, it’s advised that you install thermal pads to help keep temperatures down in use.
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