seagate portable mac external drives reviews

Even a basic USB 3 or 3.2 Gen 1 drive will be fast enough for most purposes, while you can pair the latest USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 and 4 SSDs with a laptop that supports them and get enough speed for 4K video editing or gaming. They’re cheap, capacious and increasingly speedy – and all you need to do is plug them in. This isn’t just hitting PC gamers, but also the console crowd.Įxternal HDDs and SSDs are the answer. Gamers get it even harder – we’re seeing some big titles demanding more than 100GB, with some getting closer to 200GB. High-res audio files, 4K videos and 20-megapixel photos can quickly fill the average laptop’s 256GB SSD, and if you’re working on a project or holding on to your music files and photos, you’ll soon run out of space. Now that USB 2.0 has been banished from all self-respecting storage, we find USB 3 as the standard for connection, letting these portable drives perform as quickly as the little disks inside will allow.Laptops and PCs keep getting smaller and lighter, but storage space has never seemed so tight – which is why you need the best external hard drive you can afford.

Some portable drives include software that can help automate this process, keeping your selected directories in sync whenever you plug in the drive or by a daily schedule. You may be able to keep a perfect clone of your entire computer’s internal drive, on standby and ready in the event that the computer is lost or its drive should malfunction.Īlternatively, you may choose just to back up the most important files and documents from your user libraries, such as text documents, photos, films, music and stored email. Off-loading your music collection alone from a computer to a portable drive can be a godsend in freeing valuable space if your laptop has limited storage.Īnother popular application of portable storage is for keeping critical backups of your data held on a PC or laptop. Even in the smallest portable drives you’ll likely find are 128GB in size, which is enough to space thousands of CD albums in lossless FLAC format, or even more in lower quality MP3 or AAC formats.

Seagate portable mac external drives reviews