1. Top External Hard Drives For Mac

External hard drives are an inexpensive way to store our digital photos. For Mac users like me, external storage is often the only way to hold an image library that contains thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of digital images. Although any brand or model of external disk will suffice for image storage these devices are not all the same. I use external hard drives for two very different purposes.

For my, meaning the copy of my images that I work on everyday with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop CC, drive performance matters. For my primary storage, for the drive that holds my Photos Go Here folder, I am willing to spend more for features like a faster rotational speed and Thunderbolt connectivity. I am willing to spend a lot more for my primary photo storage disk because time is money. Sitting around waiting for this external hard drive to do something is not a productive use of my day. USB does not compare to Thunderbolt in terms of real-world drive performance. The read-write speeds that USB drive connections permit are less than ideal for professional-grade daily use for my primary image storage drive.

Top External Hard Drives For Mac

The opposite is true though for the series of external hard drives that I use to protect my work. For my backup system, high-speed connectivity do not matter at all.

For my backup system, inexpensive USB external hard drives are just fine. Drive performance does not matter to me here since is scheduled to run automatically at hours when I am not awake or working at the computer. Let’s briefly discuss one more issue before I suggest specific brands and models of hard drive; portability.

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A portable hard drive is the best way to increase your storage capacity. Choose the right external hard drive based on its compatibility with your existing hardware. Whether you want an external drive that is fast, durable, lightweight, or just comes with a ton of storage, these are the best external hard drives of the year! Take a look and find the best model.

The external hard drives that are the most portable, those little drives that fit easily in a shirt pocket and that do not require a separate power supply, are always more expensive than their full-size cousins. Small and light is wonderful but I would not choose to rely on this type of external hard drive unless you really are out on the road working all of the time. “Pocket” style drives are also more prone to errors and to overheating than their larger cousins. With these distinctions in mind then here are the drives that I recommend for primary image storage and for use in a rotating external backup drive system. Primary Storage (Thunderbolt 3 / Thunderbolt 2) • • • • • • Backup Disks (USB-C / USB-3.0) • • • • • • • If needed, look into adapters like this to use older USB 3.0 / 2.0 devices with a computer that uses a new USB-C port. Likewise, many Mac users might find a essential for connecting to a brand new Mac. You might notice that I have not included any RAID drive systems, or multi-drive enclosures, in this list.