#Best external disk drive for mac full#

You may also need the extra space eventually.Īs you can see in the chart above, while the $50/1TB is the most affordable initially, it’s by far the worst deal in terms of cost per TB/GB. The 1TB drive may seem like the best deal, but in terms of price per gigabyte, the 4TB and 5TB drives are far better deals. Keep in mind, this is one drive on one day (May 13, 2021), and just one vendor, Amazon, but it illustrates the point. In fact, dollar for dollar, cheaper low-capacity drives are most often the worst deal.įor example, we compared prices of the WD My Passport portable drive in its 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 5TB capacities.

However, while you might think that the lowest-cost drive provides the most value, it often doesn’t. Capacity and priceįor most consumers, the main shopping concerns for external storage are capacity and price. Yes, USB4 will provide the same massive throughput as Thunderbolt 3 (with more possibly to come), though without some of the latter’s features, such as daisy-chaining. What you need to know before you buy USB Forum

#Best external disk drive for mac full#

See the full review of the Portable SSD X5 on our sister site Macworld. Or you may simply soon see USB4 drives with the same 40Gbps transfer rates. The advent of USB4 should alleviate this, but only if vendors decide to combine it with the superset technology that is Thunderbolt 4. The only reason we don’t universally recommend the Portable SSD X5 is the relative rarity of Thunderbolt 3/4 ports on PCs. As an NVMe SSD using PCIe over a cable (that’s basically what Thunderbolt 3 is), it’s stupidly fast-over 2.5GBps reading and writing. If you have Thunderbolt 3 or 4 on your system, you owe it to yourself to check out a portable Thunderbolt 3 drive such as Samsung’s Portable SSD X5.