best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc

#Best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc for mac
#Best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc movie
#Best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc upgrade
#Best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc portable

If storage space is your primary need, look no further than the 4 TB HDD from Western Digital. Large and affordable: Western Digital My Passport 4 TB HDD With those features in mind, it’s best to do some research before making a decision on the best external hard drive for Mac. The tradeoff is usually a weaker case, more prone to damage if dropped.

#Best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc portable

Size and durability: For those of you who need the best portable hard drive for Mac, you might opt for a physically smaller drive that is easy to carry around and slip into laptop bags. A safe middle ground is USB 3.0 or the much faster USB-C.

#Best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc movie

For reference, a 4K movie file is about 100 GB, but a short video saved from your phone might only be 30 MB.Ĭable standard: Some external hard drives use Apple’s proprietary Thunderbolt cable - a very fast standard but not compatible with Windows PCs and lots of other devices. If you need maximum storage space, HDD is your best bet for the money.Ĭapacity: Most drives begin at 128 GB of storage (including the MacBook Air hard drive) and work their way up in doubles, up to about 2 TB for SSD and over 4 TB for HDD. HDD vs SSD: If you care about speed, SSD is the only way to go. There are several important things to look for when buying an external hard drive. However, they are still widely used among professionals and content creators who work with large files or need locally stored backups of their Mac hard drive.

#Best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc for mac

With the recent introduction of cloud-based storage, such as Google Drive and Dropbox, external hard drives for Mac have become less popular for the casual user. What to look for in an Apple external hard drive?

That said, the choice depends on what you’re using your drive for. They quickly became sought-after, especially as an external hard drive for MacBook Pro. Of course, SSD technology made its way to external hard drives too. The speed difference between SSD and HDD is so vast, though, that you’ll not want to go back. That’s why the latest Macs and MacBooks now have faster drives, but less storage space than they did five years ago. The newer technology means that SSDs are smaller, lighter, and faster - but they come at a greater price. Conversely, HDDs have a mechanical arm and magnetic tape that physically write and read information. You might recall hearing about flash drives back when USB stick drives were popular - SSD technology is largely the same, just on a bigger scale.

Also known as flash drives, SSDs store information on microchips and have no moving parts. In simple terms, SSDs are much faster than traditional HDDs. What’s the difference between SSD and HDD Mac hard drives? The quite obvious tradeoff here is that you have to carry external hard drives around with you, unless they are purely used as occasional backups. It’s also a good way to transfer files quickly between devices, including between Macs and PCs - although this is generally best reserved for large files.įinally, external hard drives are great for making backups of your files so that they are physically isolated from your device - this is a good measure of security because your primary drive could become compromised.

#Best portable hard drive compatible for both mac and pc upgrade

You can upgrade them, but Apple makes this both difficult and costly. MacBooks, in particular, often come with only 128 GB of Apple hard drive storage. The most obvious reason to use an external hard drive over and above your existing one is to extend limited storage capacity - something which has ironically become smaller over the years thanks to the SSD technology. However, over the past decade, internal Hard Disk Drives (HDD) became bigger, cheaper, and faster to the point where needing an external drive for Mac was unnecessary for most users - until a new standard of technology was released with the Solid State Drive (SSD). External hard drives are almost identical to the hard drives found inside of your MacBook or PC - they store information the same way, but happen to be enclosed in a separate case and connected via cable (or WiFi).ĭue to their portability, external drives have long been a favorite among those needing extra room for their files, backups of their important documents, or an easy way to transfer information between machines.