Best external hard drives for mac 2012

If you tuck your Mac under your arm and hit the road without the external drive, you'll be leaving all your user data behind. This guide provides details for using Disk Utility. Share Pin Email. Tom Nelson has written hundreds of articles, tutorials, and reviews for Other World Computing and About. He is the president of Coyote Moon, Inc. Buffalo Technology has a line of desktop drives called DriveStation that are often used for backup solutions. Many of the models support multiple drives as well as data encryption.

The company also offers NAS network attached storage models for a complete network solution to your expansion needs. G-Technology has a wide range of products to choose from, including its popular G Drive series of desktop drives, available in single and multi-drive configurations.

G-Technology's portable lineup is also impressive and includes multi-drive portable options. Many of the enclosures make use of solid-state drives SSDs to really help boost your Mac's performance. You'll also find a good selection of RAID systems , including docking stations that let you replace a drive without having to power off the storage system. LaCie has external drives for mobile use; simply pick one up and go. There are also drives available for desktop use or creating RAID arrays.

External Hard Drive - MacBook Air (inch, Early ) - Storage - Mac Accessories - Apple

Other World Computing may have the widest selection of desktop, portable, and RAID-based external storage solutions available specifically for the Mac. OWC also offers enclosures with a wide range of interfaces, including many that offer multiple ports so you can use the enclosure today with your MacBook Pro and its FireWire ports, and later use it with USB 3. Promise Technology specializes in high-performance storage systems. Its Mac-compatible products include Thunderbolt-based single and multi-drive enclosures. The hard drive or SSD is one component that you often can replace yourself, especially in older Macs.

Before doing anything you need to be sure exactly what model Mac you have. This will help you figure out if you can upgrade the hard drive in your Mac, and help you find the right parts. If your Mac is more than a few years old, you can almost certainly upgrade the hard drive. While it is possible to replace the hard drive on any Mac not listed above, how difficult it is varies wildly with the model. The Mac Pro is designed to have its hard drive replaced easily, while an iMac requires you to remove the entire screen. They have guides for every Mac model and sell all the parts you need.

There is definitely a difference between established brands and lesser known newcomers to the market.

How we tested

In , the general consumer external hard drive market is dominated by two big players, Western Digital and Seagate, which have both been in the business over 20 years. At MacHow2 we use Western Digital WD external hard drives on a regular basis and would not hesitate to recommend them such as the rock solid WD My Passport range of external hard drives. However, Mac users should definitely avoid brands such as LaCie, Fujitsu and Toshiba which in our experience, can be very flaky and significantly more prone to mechanical failure. Those that edit video directly from an external drive can therefore expect their hard drive fail quicker and should definitely invest in higher end quality hard drives featured here such as the WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo or OWC ThunderBay.

The chances of two external hard drives failing at the same moment are extremely slim so if your backups are really important, using two drives is the best thing you can do for backups.

Best external hard drives for Macs in 12222

One thing that can instantly destroy your hard drive is a power surge in your home or office electricity supply. However, you can easily protect against this with a cheap Surge Protector Power Strip which is well worth the investment for your Mac too. However, a common occurrence with cheaper brand external hard drives is that the inverter inside fails which basically allows too much power to short-circuit and destroy the hard drive.

These are some simple measures you can take to help protect yourself from the worst and preserve the life of your Mac external drive. If you want to learn more about why hard drives fail, you can find an interesting look at hard drive reliability here.

External hard drives now offer massive amounts of storage space and the starting point in most external hard drives is now generally at least 1 Terabyte or more. Cloud storage solutions such as iCloud and OneDrive are certainly reducing the need for physical storage but the bigger your external storage device is, the more it can grow with you.

As photos and videos increase in size most high-end digital cameras and even iPhones can film in 4K for example which eats massive amounts of hard drive space the bigger the better. For those looking for serious storage space for enterprise backups or 4K editing, the OWC ThunderBay goes up to 40TB but will set you back over a few thousand dollars. There are two types of external hard drives for Mac: 3.

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Portable drives will easily fit in your jacket pocket. Almost all external hard drives nowadays are still mechanical drives which means they have moving parts inside. Mechanical external hard drives feature moving parts which can deteriorate and break more easily.

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SSD drives are also silent and run cooler compared to mechanical drives which whir and buzz due to the drive spinning which also creates more heat. But at the moment, mechanical drives still rule the external drive market and offer the biggest capacities for the best prices. A RPM drive will be faster than a RPM drive because the drive revolves faster and therefore can be read by the drive head quicker. Most external hard drives have a USB 3. The business of external hard drive connections can be extremely confusing as technology changes and Apple seemingly keeps changing ports on every new generation of Mac.

All new Macs since have ditched Firewire in favor of Thunderbolt connections offering staggering maximum data transfer speeds of up to 40 Gigabits per second Gbps port connection speeds are measured in Megabits per second Mbps or Gigabits per second Gbps — Mbps equals 1 Gbps. However, it is USB 3. All Macs from have at least one USB 3. To complicate things however, USB 3. Firewire meanwhile has pretty much been abandoned by most external hard drive manufacturers although there are a few that still support it. Almost all external hard drives for Mac now use a USB 3. If your Mac is from onwards then it will have at least one USB 3.

You can check this by doing the following:.

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There you will see if you have a USB 3. Macs before only have USB 2. The only difference is you will get a maximum data transfer speed of Mbps compared to 5 Gbps with USB 3. USB 3. The problem is that most external hard drive manufacturers simply do not support it.

Since , new Macs have Thunderbolt connections. The latest MacBook Pros from late onwards have Thunderbolt 3 connections which offers speeds of up to 40 Gbps per second.