Here then is our selection of the best external hard drives for Mac in 2019 in order of ranking. WD My Passport For Mac. The Western Digital 1TB My Passport For Mac is the perfect 1TB portable external hard drive for Mac users. There are an insane amount of options when it comes to external hard drives for you Mac, and it can be a pain to look through all of them. Best External Hard Drives for Mac in 2018. Best ways to back up your Mac. Lory Gil, Mike Matthews and Christine Chan.

• Best External Backup Drive For Mac

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Who this is for: People who frequently move between locations and want a hard drive to back up important documents and photos from their laptop. Why we like it: The is one of the lightest, thinnest hard drives we tested in our guide to the, and it was consistently faster than the competition in our multi-file music and photo transfer tests.

More important, it’s reliable—the tried-and-true Slim has been one of our picks for four years, and has an acceptable 9 percent reported failure rate across nearly 2,701 user reviews on Amazon. Seagate includes handy backup software, too. The 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is reliable and has fast transfer rates. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald Flaws but not dealbreakers: The Backup Plus Slim’s USB port wobbles when pressure is applied to the cable. If you break the port, you won’t be able to access your data until you find a new enclosure. The Slim has a two-year warranty that’s a year shorter than that of Western Digital’s drives, and we’ve read some complaints about Seagate’s customer service on Amazon, but we don’t think either of these issues are dealbreakers.

Learn more in our full guide to. If you spend most of your time at one desk: Desktop hard drive. Who this is for: People who spend most of their time working in one place and want to keep their important documents and photos safe on a higher-capacity, faster, and more cost-effective hard drive.

Why we like it: is very reliable—we found it had a 6 percent failure rate across nearly 400 reviews on Amazon—and it offers the best balance of speed and price. It was about as fast as its competition in all of our tests, it’s the least expensive drive we tested, and it has a longer warranty (three years) than the other contenders. Plus, 4 TB should be more than enough space for your future storage needs. A great external desktop hard drive should be reliable, fast, and inexpensive, like the 4 TB Western Digital My Book. Photo: Rozette Rago Flaws but not dealbreakers: All of the desktop drives we tested were good, and we found the speed differences between them to be small. Because they perform so similarly, we recommend getting the cheapest desktop hard drive you can find from a trustworthy maker. Right now, that means the.

If you find that costs less, go for it: WD’s and drives are just as fast and reliable as the My Book, and is another good option if it’s on sale. Learn more in our full guide to. The best performance: Portable solid-state drive (SSD). Who this is for: Photographers, creative professionals, and people who don’t mind spending a lot per gigabyte to get a compact 500 GB drive that’s between three and five-and-a-half times faster than portable hard drives or desktop hard drives. Why we like it: The works reliably, and it was consistently faster than other portable SSDs in our tests. The Samsung supports faster, USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds with a Type-C port, and it includes AES 256-bit hardware encryption to protect your sensitive data. The T5 is about as expensive per gigabyte as other external SSDs, and it’s one of the lightest and most compact.

Best External Backup Drive For Mac

It has the most straightforward software to navigate, which makes it a breeze to set up encryption or check for updates. Plus the T5 has an indicator light that lets you know when it’s connected. It comes with a three-year warranty. Who this is for: Network-attached storage is ideal for people who have large media libraries, because you can store your files in one place and stream them locally to other devices. It’s also useful for backing up multiple computers to a single location. You could also use a NAS if you have too much data to store in Dropbox or Google Drive, or if you don’t trust your data to a cloud storage provider. Why we like it: The is the fastest NAS we tested, and it offers powerful hardware for around $300 (plus the cost of hard drives, around $250 for a pair of or around $500 for a pair of ).

It also includes AES-NI hardware encryption acceleration for added security, has upgradable RAM, and comes with flexible software that’s easy to understand and works with a wide variety of, such as Plex, BitTorrent Sync, and GitLab. You can use the DS218+ as a home backup device, a media streamer, a mail server, a website-hosting device, a BitTorrent box, or a video-surveillance recorder. Who this is for: People who need to quickly move large amounts of data often—large media files like raw photos and video—from one computer to another, without relying on the Internet for convenience, speed, or privacy. Why we like it: The combines a low cost with one of the most consistently fast speeds in a flash drive we’ve tested. It has a metal casing with an excellent build quality but is not so overly bulky that it will end up blocking any other USB ports on your laptop. It also has a blinking activity light that indicates when data is being transferred—a neat feature that other flash drives tend to lack. The Kingston DataTraveler comes with a five-year warranty, which is less than SanDisk’s lifetime warranty, but we still think this is plenty of time to find any issues with the drive.