10/22/2021 0 Comments Best Usb External Drive For Mac
LaCie Rugged Mini USB External Hard Drive 4. My Passport Portable External Hard Drive 3. SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD 2. Best External Hard Drives for Photographers by Category 1.
![]() Best Usb External Drive Portable External HardIt boasts heavy-duty protection against shock, falls, water, dust and crushing. The drive needs to be plugged into a power outlet, but it’s fast and there are tons of capacity options all the way up to 18TB.If you want something you can carry, the best portable external hard drive is the G-Technology ArmorATD. Find out about editing the registry and if it's safe to do so in our guide: Should you use Windows registry-editing software?View Deal What are the best external hard drives?Our own tests showed that the best non-portable external hard drive is the WD My Book (model number WDBBGB), which offers the best balance of cost, capacity and other features.(We'll be testing it soon.) The newer version costs twice as much, but if super-fast reads are your game, then go for it.-Obscenely expensive -Requires Thunderbolt 3 for best performanceIf your computer has a Thunderbolt 3 port and if money is (more or less) no object, the Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD is the best external hard drive for you.It’s rated for stratospheric speeds (2,800 MBps read, 2,300 MBps write), and it delivered on them in our tests. The SanDisk Secure Access application applies general encryption, too.The drive is a shade expensive, and the integrated carrying loop is too big to easily fit on a standard keychain. Otherwise, this is an excellent storage device that's ideal for heavy everyday use.Since we tested the Extreme Pro Portable SSD, SanDisk has released a second version that integrates USB 3.2 to get speeds of up to 2,000Mbps but looks exactly the same as its predecessor. Suave looks? Its rounded corners, black-and-red coloration, delicately pockmarked front and soft-touch back give it an appearance and feel that are both thoroughly modern and refreshingly classic.Ok, how about speed? The USB 3.1 version of the Extreme Pro Portable SSD is rated for sequential reads of 1,050MBps, and in our own performance tests, it routinely came out at or near the top of the rankings. You can easily use it anywhere, and there's a newer model that offers twice the speed.No matter what you want from the best external hard drive, the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD delivers it.Convenient design? It’s small and light enough to fit in your hand but not get lost in your pocket or bag. But there’s no better choice if you want the bleeding edge and are willing to pay for it.-Somewhat expensive -Short USB Type-C cableThe WD My Passport SSD with USB 3.2 doesn’t look like its travel-enabling namesake, the My Passport Go, but it’s all ready to go places. You can save money on other drives that will still be darn fast, so the X5 won’t be worth it for most people. If you don’t have Thunderbolt 3 (which uses the same ports as USB-C), you won't see all it can do.And, yikes, is this drive expensive, starting at $200 for 500GB and going up to $600 for the 2TB configuration. (A two-month membership to the Adobe CC Photography Plan, which includes Lightroom and Photoshop for organizing and editing your photos, is provided as well.)But with square corners and an antiquated, two-tone design, the drive isn’t a looker. (Our review unit was the former.)After your drive is registered, you can download Toolkit to enable automatic file backups or Mylio, for organizing your photos. (A Type-A adapter comes in the package to ensure the drive will work with a wide variety of systems.) But these are small nitpicks that don’t detract from one of the best external hard drives around.-Overall poor performance -Uninspiring designDespite measuring only 4.5 x3.2 x 0.8 inches — only slightly larger than a deck of cards — the HDD-based Seagate Backup Plus Portable packs either 4TB or 5TB of storage. And its included USB Type-C cable is exceedingly short: 6.5 inches, which makes using this drive a bit of a hassle on either laptop or desktop computers. Best of all, it’s fast: The My Passport zoomed through all of our performance tests, invariably showing up somewhere in the winner’s circle for each.With a price per gigabyte of $0.19, the 1TB model is one of the most expensive drives we tested. Malwarebytes for mac computerHow we test external hard drivesWe hooked up each external hard drive drive to a current-generation Dell XPS 17 laptop, using the best connection interface available to that drive, always in the same port, to minimize performance differentials.Then we ran the same series of synthetic and real-world tests on the drives in the same order, so every drive would function as much like the others as possible. Manufacturers these days frequently market portable drives as fashion accessories, selling them in various sizes, shapes, and colors. SSDs are nowhere near that inexpensive, but smaller drives (1-2TB) can be found from just over $100 to $200 or more.If a drive’s looks matter to you, you’ll definitely have choices. The interface can also make a difference Thunderbolt 3 will be a lot faster than USB, for example.For capacity, traditional hard drives (HDDs) offer a lot more options, but SSDs are generally able to house the same amount of storage in a smaller amount of space.As for price, it’s possible to find huge hard drives (think 4TB) for $100 or less. How to choose the best external hard drive for youDo you care more about speed, capacity, or price? If it’s the first, SSDs store data in flash memory rather than on spinning platters the way traditional hard drives do and thus operate a whole lot faster. But if you need a spacious drive, but don’t mind if it’s simple and slow, too, the Backup Plus Portable is not a terrible choice. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorCheryl ArchivesCategories |