BestExternal Hard DrivesWindows Central2019

Hard Drive For Macbook
External Hard Drive For Mac
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Having an external hard drive around can come in handy if you need to add a little (or a lot) of extra storage space to your PC setup with little hassle. Navigating the sea of external drives can, however, be quite daunting. So we've compiled a list of the best picks to get you started.

Light and small: Seagate Backup Plus Slim

Editor's choice

The Backup Plus Slim is one of the smallest and lightest hard-disk drives (HDD) out there, available in four different sizes up to 5TB and four different colors. It's just 0.48 inches thick for easy portability in your laptop bag or pocket, and USB-A 3.0 connectivity means relatively fast transfer speeds.

How to Share an External Drive Between a Mac and a PC. Partitioning your drive. To format an internal or external hard drive to use for backup or additional storage, the drive needs to be.
Finding the best external hard drive for your Mac can breathe new life into your workflow. Especially if you have a MacBook, iMac or Mac Mini, you may have limited internal upgrade options.

Mac OSX 10.9.x, and 10.10.x include a built in utility known as Disk Utility that can be used to partition and format a hard drive. To partition and format the drive with Disk Utility, follow these steps.

From $60 at Amazon

Solid-state drive: Samsung T5 Portable

Staff pick Mac

If an HDD just won't do and you have the cash, Samsung's T5 500GB external solid-state drive (SSD) is the best you can buy right now with up to 540 MB/s read and write speeds. This drive has a single USB-C port on it for fast data transfer, but it includes both USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A 3.1 cables in the box.

$88 at Amazon

Plenty of colors: Western Digital My Passport

Weighing in at around eight ounces, this HDD measures in at about the same size as your average wallet. It also packs plenty of space, with sizes ranging from 1TB to 4TB. USB-A 3.0 connectivity means fairly speedy transfers, and Western Digital includes the option to keep your sensitive files protected with 256-bit AES hardware encryption.

From $50 at Amazon

Made for mobility: SanDisk Extreme SSD

SanDisk's Extreme SSD is available in sizes from 250GB up to 2TB, and it's designed to be easily carried around with you. A cutout in the top corner allows you to clip it to a bag or case, USB-C connectivity allows for transfer speeds up to 550MB/s, and it's water and dust resistant so you can worry less about your data.

From $73 at Amazon

Bulk storage: Western Digital My Book Desktop

If you aren't concerned with portability and simply want a solid, self-powered external HDD for your desktop, look no further than the Western Digital My Book Desktop. Get up to 10TB of storage, protect your files with 256-bit AES encryption, and connect with USB-A 3.0 for file transfers.

IDG The SSD is quite fast for such a thin-and-light laptop. https://carbrown.amebaownd.com/posts/16621431. Frankly, after looking at the performance of the A12 and A12X in the latest iPhones and iPad Pro, I’m ready for the eventual switch to Apple-designed processors in MacBooks.

From $85 at Amazon

Rugged storage: CalDigit Tuff

If you're hard on your hardware, the Tuff drive from CalDigit offers a four-foot drop rating, water resistance for up to 30 minutes in about three feet of water, and a dust- and shock-resistant coating. Use USB-C or USB-A 3.1 to connect, and choose from five different colors, all with 2TB of storage.

From $120 at Amazon

Thunderbolt 3 speed: Samsung X5 SSD

Want the fastest transfer speeds possible (up to 2,800 MB/s read and 2,300 MB/s write) from your external drive? Samsung's X5 SSD uses Thunderbolt 3 to connect for blistering transfers, and it's all wrapped up in a sleek, compact metal body. If you have a laptop with modern ports and don't want to wait around, this should be a great pick.

From $218 at Amazon

If we're picking an external hard drive ..

All of the drives listed above have their perks and will make a great storage option for the right person, but if we're picking one, we suggest the Seagate Backup Plus Slim. It's small enough to easily tote around with you, there are lots of storage options up to 5TB available, and it uses USB-A 3.0 for wide compatibility and respectable transfer speeds. It's also one of the least expensive options on the list, making it ideal for most people.

If you need something with faster speeds that keeps the same sleek form, we also recommend the Samsung T5 SSD. You'll ultimately pay more, but you'll see read and write speeds up to 540MB/s and compatibility with USB-C and USB-A ports. This drive is also surprisingly small, enough so that you can tuck it away into most pockets without much trouble. If 500GB isn't enough, be sure to have a look at the 1TB model.

If you're looking for a storage solution that's quite a bit more robust and expandable, you might be looking for Network Attached Storage (NAS). There's always the option of building your own NAS, but for those who'd rather buy a prebuilt, we've rounded up the best options available now.

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HomeStorageExternal StorageHow to format external hard drive for Mac and PC?

Often switch between a Mac and PC? Want to use one USB flash storage device for both? The thing is that by default, these platforms use different file systems – discs are formatted differently. Windows uses NTFS, and Mac OS uses HFS, these file systems are not compatible with each other. However there is a simple solution – you can format the drive to FAT32 or exFAT that performs better than FAT32. In the resulut, your external hard drive will work just fine with Mac and Windows.

You can format your external hard drive from either the PC or Mac. Just keep in mind if you want to use your drive also for OS X’s Time Machine backups, we advise you to format your drive through Mac because there is an additional step to make drive compatible with “Time Machine Backups”. And you can only do this with exFAT as with FAT32 Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup won’t work.

FAT32 or exFAT?

You can format your external hard drive in both – exFAT and FAT32. They both will work just fine. Mac and PC can read and write on both. However, each of these filesystems has their own pros and cons. FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit, but exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB, that’s more than you will ever need. If you have to work with large video clips, games or any other kind of massive files, FAT32 may not be the best choice. Many still choose FAT32 over exFAT despite its slower performance, as it’s also compatible with Linux Os and is supported on many gaming consoles.

Hard Drive For Macbook

Once you have done with formatting, your external hard drive will be able to write and read files from both a PC and Mac. The resulting FAT32 file system will be compatible with all versions of Mac OS X, and Windows including Windows 10 back to 95. This is one of the most widely recognized file system formats.

FAT32 – a file system normally used on USB disks
exFAT – a newer file system optimized for flash devices and has improved performance overFAT32

Why I can’t use NTFS on Mac?

The default file system for Windows is NTFS (New Technology File System). Macs that run Snow Leopard or Lion can read data from drives that are formatted as NTFS. However, they can’t write. To make your Mac compatible writing on NTFS you have to get and install a third-party driver. So in the end, it’s possible to make your NTFS external hard drive compatible with Mac. But we advise to just format it to “FAT” file system as it’s less time consuming and ea

Format Hard Drive For Mac 2018