The Thunderbolt Drive+ is the second Thunderbolt portable drive from Elgato and it's a major upgrade to the already very fast predecessor, that came out two years ago. Apart from the support for USB 3.0, the new drive shares the same compact and bus-powered design as its older brother.

This drive is already formatted for Mac and fully compatible with Thunderbolt 3. It's a 1TB solid state drive, making it perfect for smaller projects, with transfer speeds of up to 770MB/s. This portable RAID solution comes in black, white, gold, gray, and silver, and features a rugged enclosure that's designed to be taken on the road with you. Backup your Mac with AirPort Time Capsules. Safekeep all of your music, photographs and films. Buy online with fast, free shipping.

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Best word processors for mac. The new device now includes a Thunderbolt (and a USB 3.0) cable, which previous model didn't at launch, making it ready to use right out of the box. That is, if you can afford its current hefty price of $480 for 256GB (or $900 for 512GB).

Best Thunderbolt Hard Drives Buying Guide: Welcome to Technika’s round-up of the top Thunderbolt Hard Drives you can buy in 2018. This buying guide is the result of many days of research, reading thousands of user reviews, crowdsourced opinions and owner ratings, our personal experience, and more. The solutions in this article work with these Mac models, which have Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports: iMac Pro; iMac models from 2017; Mac mini (2018) MacBook Pro models from 2016 or later; MacBook Air (Retina, 13-inch, 2018) MacBook Pro (pictured), MacBook Air, iMac Pro, iMac, and Mac mini have multiple Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports. Their G-Drive Mobile with Thunderbolt is a 1 TB hard drive that runs at 7200 RPM, making it a faster little bugger than some of the competition. The aluminum case is an attractive accompaniment for your Mac.

But it's going to be money well-spent since the Thunderbolt Drive+ is by far the fastest portable drive on the market to date. However, if top performance is not a mandate, you can always check out this list for other great, more affordable portable drives.

Drive type	External Thunderbolt hard drive
Connector options	Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, USB 2.0
Available capacities	256GB, 512GB
Product dimensions (LWH)	5.2x0.8x3.3 inches
Weight	9.5 oz
Capacity of test unit	256GB
OSes supported	Windows 7 or later, Mac OS X 10.6.8 or later.

Frill-free plug-and-play design
The new Thunderbolt Drive+ share the same design as the previous Thunderbolt SSD, which is a typical portable drive that's based on a 2.5-inch internal drive. It measures just 5.2 inches by 0.8 inch by 3.3 inches and weighing only 0.5 pound. Its housing is made of aluminum with a grainy finish that doesn't attract dust or fingerprints. On the inside, the drive houses an internal solid-state drive (SSD) from Plextor, which is accountable for its great performance.

Best writing applications for mac. All are either Essentials or Editors’ Choices in the Mac App Store.

On the bottom of the new Thunderbolt Drive+ drive has four small screws that presumably allow you to take the take apart and replace the SSD on the inside. Doing so would void the warranty, however.

The new drive comes with one Thunderbolt port and one USB 3.0 port. It doesn't support Thunderbolt 2 but also worked with USB 2.0 in my trial. Since this is a single-volume storage device, there's no need for it to support Thunderbolt 2 since the top speed of the original Thunderbolt (10Gbps) is already much faster than the top speed of the internal SSD (6Gbps). The lack of a second Thunderbolt port, however, means that in a daisy-chain setup, the drive can only be used at the end of the chain, since you can't plug another Thunderbolt device to it. This is a normal design for a compact drive, however.

Thunderbolt Drives For Mac

Out of the box, the Thunderbolt Drive+ is formatted in HFS+ and will work right away with a Mac. You can easily reformat it to make it work with Windows computer however. The included Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 cables means that you can really use the drive right out of the box. There's no setup necessary. This is a bus-powered drive and that means you only need to use just one of the cables at a time. If you plug it into a computer with both the USB and Thunderbolt cable, only the first connection will work.

Best Thunderbolt Drives For Mac