To find the best internal hard drive, you definitely must know where you will put it and use it, which is why we built our list from what we consider to be the best 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives for various uses. This buying guide for Mac external hard drives is designed to help you narrow down the search and find the one with the features and options that will be best suited to meet your storage needs. We’ve provided the information about what to look for in a Mac external hard drive for whatever your intended purpose. Toshiba Canvio Premium for Mac. This one is the best for MacBook owners. Most portable hard drives are made for Windows. It shouldn't put off any but the most technophobic Mac owners, but the.

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Your guide

Justin Krajeski

After 18 hours of new research and testing, we found that the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is still the best portable hard drive for most people. It’s reliable, it’s one of the lightest, thinnest hard drives we tested, and it was faster than the competition in our backup and file-transfer tests.

Our pick

2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim is reliable, thin, and light, and it offers fast speeds at a reasonable cost.

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The Slim has been one of our top picks for the past four years, and it’s the only portable hard drive that we’ve tested that doesn’t sacrifice size, speed, or reliability. Every other 2 TB portable hard drive is significantly larger, performs slower in our tests, or has a failure rate that’s too high to recommend. The Slim has an acceptable 9-percent reported failure rate among nearly 2,701 user reviews. We recommend the 2 TB model because it’s a great value. Seagate includes handy backup software, too.

Also great

4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable

The 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable is a reliable drive that offers more storage space for less money per terabyte than our pick, but it’s larger and heavier.

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If you want more storage and don’t mind a larger, heavier drive, we continue to recommend the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable, which costs less per terabyte than the 2 TB Backup Plus Slim. It was faster at sequential reading in our HD Tune test, but it was slower in our other testing. It’s twice as thick as our top pick and almost twice as heavy, too. (Make sure not to buy the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast by mistake—that’s a different drive that we do not recommend.)

Everything we recommend

Our pick

2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim

The Seagate Backup Plus Slim is reliable, thin, and light, and it offers fast speeds at a reasonable cost.

Buying Options

Also great

4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable

The 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable is a reliable drive that offers more storage space for less money per terabyte than our pick, but it’s larger and heavier.

Buying Options

The research

Why you should trust us

Wirecutter has researched and recommended hard drives since early 2012, and our PC team has over eight years of combined experience testing hard drives and solid-state drives. I’ve spent the last two years reviewing hard drives and SSDs. Whats the best antivirus software for mac. We’ve collectively spent nearly 200 hours researching and testing portable hard drives in just the past four years.

Who this is for

If you’re not backing up the important documents and photos on your computer, you should start. Your computer's internal drive will stop working someday, and unless your data is backed up, it'll be gone forever. Fortunately, backing up your data is easy and getting started takes only a few minutes: Read our advice and set up a system that will back up your files automatically both to an external hard drive and the cloud. Just backing up to one or the other isn't enough; having both onsite and cloud backups ensures that your data stays safe from localized threats such as fire, theft, or natural disaster, as well as Internet outages or disruptions to the cloud backup provider. A portable hard drive is a great local backup for a computer you take from your house to the coffee shop, on business trips, or on vacations.

You should consider replacing your backup drives between the third and sixth year of use. If your drive dies and you have a cloud backup, you won’t lose data, but restoring from the cloud will take a very long time. According to statistics from cloud backup service Backblaze, hard drives are most likely to fail either within the first 18 months of use or after three years. About 5 percent of drives fail in the first 18 months of use, and the failure rate lowers to about 1.5 percent for another 18 months. At three years of service, the failure rate jumps to almost 12 percent. At the four year mark, the failure rate is 20 percent. Based on five years of data, Backblaze estimated that more than half of hard drives will last six years.

You should consider replacing your backup drives between the third and sixth year of use. https://babrown.amebaownd.com/posts/15530184.

If you frequently move between different locations and need a drive to keep in your bag and use to back up photos and other data while you’re traveling, you should get a portable external drive like the ones we recommend in this guide. But if you spend most of your time working from one desk, a desktop external drive is the better choice. They’re less expensive per terabyte and a bit faster than portable drives, but desktop external hard drives are bigger and heavier than portable ones and require an additional power adapter. And although one bump can still lead to failure, portable hard drives are designed to withstand a little more abuse than desktop hard drives. If you can afford to pay around three times more for a smaller, lighter, more durable and much faster portable drive with hardware encryption, we recommend a portable solid-state drive.

How we picked

External Hard Drive For Mac

Ideally, a portable hard drive is something you don’t notice much. It should sit on your desk, quietly storing and backing up your data. And if you want to throw it in your bag (carefully), that shouldn’t be a problem. These are the features you should look for in a portable hard drive, in rough order of importance:

Reliability: Although reliability is the most important factor for any storage device, solid information on reliability can be hard to come by. Only three companies still manufacture hard drives—Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba—and all of them make reliable hard drives. But all hard drives die. While the vast majority of drives from these manufacturers will be fine until you upgrade to a faster, more spacious drive in a few years, it’s still possible to buy a bad egg that will die too soon.
Build quality: Your portable hard drive should be able to withstand normal wear and tear from being handled and thrown into your bag often. Rugged portable drives are bulkier and more expensive than the portable drives we recommend for most people. (You can read more about rugged drives in the Competition section.)
Physical size and weight: The smaller and lighter, the better. Your portable hard drive should also draw all the power it needs from the USB port, no power adapter necessary.
Speed: Even though portable hard drives are generally slower than their desktop brethren, speed is still important. You’re more likely to use a portable drive to transfer large files between different computers, so a faster drive will save you time. We considered only those drives with USB 3.0 connections. Anything faster isn’t necessary for hard drives, because they’re limited by disk speed, not the USB interface.
Price: We found that most people buy 2 TB and 4 TB drives by looking at Amazon reviews for our top picks. While a higher-capacity drive is more cost-effective per

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