$499.00 MSRP Editors' Rating Type External External External External External External External External External External Storage Capacity (as Tested) 2 TB 8 TB 500 GB 2 TB 2 TB 512 GB 3 TB 12 TB 1 TB 1 TB Rotation Speed 5400 rpm 7200 rpm SSD SSD SSD SSD 7200 rpm 7200 rpm SSD SSD Ports USB 3.0, USB-C USB 3.0 USB 3.0, USB-C USB-C, Thunderbolt 3 USB-C Ethernet, SD Card Slot, USB 3.0, USB-C, Thunderbolt 3 USB 3.0, USB-C, Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbolt 3 USB 2.0, SD Card Slot, USB 3.0 Read Review. Tom Brant The Best External Hard Drives for Mac Looking to add storage, or for a smart way to back up your Mac? Here's what you need to know, along with our top-rated Apple-friendly drives. We've tested SSDs and platter-based drives alike. The Right Connections Buying an external hard drive for your Mac is not all that different from buying one for your Windows PC, except for one very important complication: Newer and only come with Thunderbolt 3 ports, but the arrival of Thunderbolt 3-equipped drives has been a trickle, rather than a flood. Most of the current models are designed for photographers and video editors who need to store mountains of footage and access it very quickly. As a result, they are typically SSDs or arrays, which means they're also very expensive.

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So what's a Mac user who just wants to back up his or her files using Time Machine to do? Read on as we answer that question, and solve your other Mac external-storage quandaries. A New File System Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C are the latest innovations in the external storage market, but before we get to them, we need to address a basic building block of hard drives that has always affected compatibility, and probably always will: the file system. An external drive's file system is the most important factor that determines whether or not it's readable by Macs, PCs, or both. Since the late 1990s, Apple has used the Mac OS Extended file system, commonly abbreviated as HFS+, to power its laptop and desktop computers.

But with the release of the operating system, Cupertino switched to an entirely new file format. It's simply called the, and it's the first format to be used on Apple computers as well as the iOS ecosystem of,, iPods, the Apple TV, and the Apple Watch. There are many benefits to switching from HFS+ to the Apple File System, including better security thanks to native encryption, but the most important thing to note for external drive shoppers is backward-compatibility. Any drive formatted with HFS+ (which includes most Mac-specific drives on the market today) will work just fine with a Mac that's running macOS High Sierra. Neither Apple File System nor HFS+ works with Windows, however. If you plan to use your external drive with computers that run both operating systems, you should consider a drive formatted with the exFAT file system.

Microsoft introduced exFAT about a decade ago, which means that it's still relatively young, as far as file systems go. You won't get the security and efficiency of Apple File System, but you will get the convenience of being able to transfer files back and forth between Windows and macOS simply by plugging in and unplugging your drive.

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Of course, you can easily reformat almost any drive you buy, so you're not limited to buying only those intended for use with Macs. If you really fancy a drive formatted for Windows (which will usually come preformatted in the NTFS format), you can use the Disk Utility in macOS to reformat it after you bring it home from the store.