SSD drives are faster because they have no moving parts but conventional drives are generally cheaper and offer more storage space. However, the external hard drive landscape and technologies is constantly changing and it can be difficult to know where to start when buying one.Īnd then there’s the question of whether to go for an SSD drive or conventional “mechanical drive”. Now you can get 5 Terabytes (TB) of portable storage (that’s 5000 GB!) for just over $100 such as the Western Digital 5TB My Passport which we chose as the best external hard drive for Mac users of 2021. Less than a decade ago, you would have paid several hundred dollars for a chunky hard drive with just a few Gigabytes (GB) of storage space on. Or if you’re running out of storage space on your Mac due to large files but don’t want to delete them, using an external hard drive is a great way to free-up disk space. This is good news for those in creative industries that have to handle large files such as RAW photos or high resolution videos 4K that soon eat up valuable disk space. The great thing for Mac users is that external Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SDDs) have never been cheaper and storage sizes have never been bigger. There’s still nothing as secure as offline storage so we’ve looked at the best external hard drives for Mac for all budgets in 2021.
