the best mac hard drives for 2018 wirecutter

That's handier than you might think, particularly if you're going to use it to make two flavours of backup. ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Seagate's helpful inclusion of a Mac NTFS driver means that, formatted properly, this drive can be used to store files on both Mac and Windows systems without any of the incompatibility issues that so often crop up with Mac external drives.

Whatever your specific needs, whether it's a drive you're going to carry around or something you'll keep attached to your Mac at all times, there's something here to suit. We've picked out a number of drives, with different capacities, different skills, different levels of durability. Older versions of files you've saved will remain available, so if you catastrophically save over something important you'll still have that legacy file to work with. If your Mac drive goes belly-up, you'll have an archive of everything – and using Time Machine means you also get the ability to, yes, go back in time. USB-C is certainly the port of the future, so grabbing a USB-C hard drive for your MacBook or MacBook Pro is the best way to take all of your files, music, photos, and more with you wherever you go without clogging up your Mac's own hard drive. The Western Digital External hard drive scored high marks in every category and is our top pick. Best Mac External Hard Drive We spent over 30 hours researching and testing 20 different external hard drives and found that HDD capacity, warranty, and backup speed were most important.

How to Format Your External Hard Drive by Justin Krajeski.

That expanded storage capacity is the perfect place to keep a backup of your main files, particularly if you can find a large hard drive capable of keeping both a Time Machine backup and a few extra files.Īfter testing seven new drives in 2018, we found that Western Digital’s 4 TB My Book is the best external desktop hard drive for most people. External drives aren't just about more space for files, though.Grab an appropriate USB hard drive, and you'll get fast storage that you can take around with you. If you need more storage, and can't bear to scour through your hard drive deleting all those old files, there's basically no way to add more storage internally – but adding a Mac external drive is a breeze. But they're not the friendliest things to upgrade.

The best mac hard drives for 2018 wirecutter