best ssd external hard drive for macbook pro 2020

READ NEXT: The best external hard drives for PS4 | The best external hard drives for Xbox One They’re still brilliant for backups and archives, or even just storing games that you’re not planning to play right now. However, external HDDs still have their place, giving you 2TB to 4TB of storage (or more!) at a significantly lower price. External SSDs are now in the mainstream, giving you high speeds at 1TB to 2TB capacities without breaking the bank. The answer to these problems is an external drive. You might be tempted to use cloud storage but, while it is a great way to backup vital files, it’s not always practical when you have a lot of data or large media files that you need to safeguard. If you play games you can see 1TB go in just a handful of titles, with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War grabbing between 150 and 250GB on their own. That’s a problem when even budget smartphones can produce photos that take up 10 to 16MB of space, and hi-res audio files and 4K video files are even greedier. In fact, the recent shift from HDDs (hard disk drives) to SSDs (solid state drives) has meant that space has never been so tight – 256GB SSDs are still common, and only high-performance laptops and gaming PCs ship with 1TB or more. 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.While computers keep growing ever more powerful, their storage never quite maintains the same pace. 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 the smallest portable drives are likely to be 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.

Best ssd external hard drive for macbook pro 2020