Best External Hard Drive for Mac – Solid State Drive
We talk often about the improvements USB 3.0 have made to the world of external hard drives but what about solid state drives? (SSDs) Well certainly some of the best external hard drive for Mac hdds are SSD drives and for good reason, but they certainly raise the price tag.
The Wiki on Solid State Drives explains properly what they are but basically they are a new type of hard drive which is not only a lot more resilient to dropping and travel but they also have a much faster transfer speed for files because of the way they were designed. They’re also a much quieter option than traditional external hard drives because they don’t involve spinning disks within the enclosure.
The reason we don’t review many SSD drives on the best external hard drive for mac site is that they really do bump up the price and we mainly focus on getting good deals for people who use our reviews. It’s not that there are not any great deals on solid state drives out there, or that you can’t get a good one for Apple Mac, it’s just that it’s quite a pay bump and you also get a much lower capacity than you would with a normal hdd.
They haven’t really been widely adopted yet. They just cost a lot for what you’re getting but if you have the money, you need the transfer speed and you can take the lower capacity then an SSD flash drive might well be for you. One of the best we can find is the Iomega 128 GB Super Speed. We’ve suggested Iomega drives before as one of the best external hard drives for Mac and they give really good value for money. In this case it’s still a lot higher than you’d pay for a normal hard drive but we think it’s a pretty good price for an SSD.
It’s a solid state drive with USB 3.0 connectivity (also powered from that) 128 GB of capacity and also features the usual Iomega goodies like the hardware encryption and backup software. It’s small and light making it easy to travel with without becoming a bother and while I still wouldn’t take it bungee jumping it’s not going to fall apart on you easily (the three year warranty will attest to that).
It’s ‘plug and play’ so there’s no problems getting it setup and it’s compatible with both Windows and Mac (it wouldn’t be on the best external hard drive for Mac list if it didn’t work with a Mac). It is built for USB 3.0 which you really should use if you want to make the most out of the transfer speeds a solid state drive has the offer – but it is backwards compatible with 2.0.
