the best mac hard drives for 2018 wirecutter

You can get this external hard drive from Kesu in anywhere from 80 – 750 GB, as well as black, blue, or red for the color. You’ll just plug it in, and it’s ready to go. It also doesn’t require any sort of installation or software setup when you first go to use it, which is fantastic. You don’t have to worry about this hard drive dying from a spill or being knocked off the desk, since it’s encased in a protective military-grade shell. Having a small one is great as your primary drive - keeping your important and most used data on it - but if you’re looking for an external backup drive to carry around, you still can’t be the traditional hard drive. So, what type of drive should you get? We definitely recommend a traditional hard drive, just out of sheer cost-to-storage-space ratio. The latter is considered flash memory and there’s nothing mechanical about it, meaning they last a lot longer than traditional hard drives.

There are a couple of different hard drives you can get these days - standard mechanical hard drives or solid state drives, also known as an SSD. Not only are speeds faster than USB 3.0, but it’s a more universal input type, as it’ll work with phones and tablets that have USB-C as well. If you have compatible products, USB-C is also an excellent choice. If anything, we recommend going with a USB 3.0 compatible drive, as data transfer speeds are leagues faster. USB 2.0 can be a good option, but data transfer speeds will be a lot slower. Input Type: Determining what input type your external drive will have is very important, especially with USB Type-C gaining popularity in most new machines.If you’re looking for pure speed, an SSD is the way to go here, as paired with something like Thunderbolt, you can transfer files over to your external SSD in seconds. It doesn’t matter as much with SSDs, but if you’re buying a traditional drive (more on this later), look for something that advertises 7,200 RPM. Drive Speed: Next thing to consider is drive speed.The amount of storage space one needs varies from person-to-person, so it’s up to you to decide on just how much you need for your personal use. Storage Space: Storage space is easily the most important factor in picking up an external drive - you need to figure out how much you’ll need, whether that be for storing photos, programs or regular system backups.

The best mac hard drives for 2018 wirecutter