The Best External Hard Drive for Mac

Hey there, and thanks for checking out our reviews on some of the best external hard drive for Mac devices. Since more and more people are moving over to Apple Mac we put together this site to help people make the right choice and we review some of the latest external hard drives and we try and find the best external hard drive for Mac.

There’s a lot of factors involved but so far we’re keeping on top of things and finding some great deals. Hopefully we have something here that’ll help you and if not feel free to get in contact with us (there’s a link up at the top) and we’ll do our best to give our opinions on whatever hard drive you’re looking at. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for specifically then might I suggest you take a look at our top list on the top right of this page for some of the best external hard drive for Mac we’ve found so far.the best external hard drive for mac

Keep in mind there are plenty of hard drives we haven’t reviewed yet, and plenty more we would review if we thought there was any point. Sometimes it’s not worth the time reviewing an entire hard drive just to say how bad it is – we could put an entire list of external hard drives that could fit into this list but we prefer to review hard drives that actually stand out and have something to offer. That’s not to say we don’t find problems with the ones we do review but generally we only bother to look at ones in the running for the best external hard drive for Mac.

We do our best to find the best external drives for Mac and this includes looking for the latest and best hard drive for Mac. If you’re looking for what we consider the best external hard drive 2011 then take a look at the top of the page.

Features of The Best External Hard Drive for Mac

Most people will go on about the capacity of their external hard drives. The few time anyone really goes on about external hard drives I mean – they’re not exactly a great conversation point, but you know what I mean. ‘Oh I have a 1 terbyte external hard drive!’ ‘big woop, I got a 2tb external hard drive’ and so on…

The fact is tv adverts have drilled it into peoples heads that capacity is the main thing you should look for, but honestly I’d take my best 1tb external hard drive over someones cheap 2tb external hard drive any day of the week. It’s not the size guys – it’s the full features you need to look for.

There’s some side stuff you can look at like the design and the warrantys etc… You might even choose to get something at the time because it was on sale – but there’s a few key points I always look at when I’m considering buying a new external hard drive and this is what makes it the best external hard drive for Mac, for me anyway.

  • Portability
  • Speed
  • Reliability
  • Compatibility
And after that I’ll look at price and capacity – because they’re much less of an indicator for quality to me.
Portability is important to me. Whether you travel or just move your laptop from your bedroom to the garden, you might want something you can move with you. So look for an external hard drive which is powered by it’s own USB cable (as most of the ones we review are) rather than the mains adapter. You might also want something small which slips into the pocket or beside the laptop without taking up too much room. Some of the smaller external hard drives can even be slipped into your wallet, for example.
Speed is a little two fold. You need to make sure the hard drive you’re looking at has some good read and write speeds (you’ll usually find this on the product description page like the ones we link on Amazon) and you also need the connectivity to your computer. This usually means what version of USB you use, which is likely 2.0 or 3.0. If you haven’t upgraded your computer in the last year or so you might well be on 2.0 but the upgrade is cheap and the USB 3.0 hard drives are backwards compatible with 2.0 Macs if you get one anyway.
Reliability is the main thing for me in looking for the best external hard drive for Mac. I like to see some security features, a warranty and a good reliable brand name behind it before I’ll trust buying a hard drive. If an external hard drive doesn’t have a big name it might still be good (I mean a brand new company could well make the worlds best external hard drive for Mac still) but it needs to have a lot of good reviews behind it to prove it’s not going to break down on me. There’s no point in paying for the best external hard drive for Mac if it breaks a month later – it’d be a waste of money and I’d lose whatever files I had stored there. If you want somewhere to backup your files, then it’d be nice to know that the backup itself is safe. Many of the drives we consider to be some of the best external hard drive for Mac choices are western digital external hard drive models for just this reason, they’re a well known name with a good reputation for quality external hard drives for Macs.
And finally we have compatibility. I mean that’s what these reviews are all about right? If you want the best external hard drive for Mac, then it’d probably help if the hard drive actually works on Mac although to be honest if you want to exchange files with friends, family or your work you’ll most likely want to make sure you get the best external hard drive for Mac and PC because then you don’t have to mess around trying to share files with other people using multiple hard drives. You want something that will work on both and luckily this has become a lot easier since Mac has really started to become a lot more popular and companies are quickly trying to catch up and the latest external hard drives are arriving with both Mac and PC compatibility which is a nice change.

Buying The Best External Hard Drive for Mac

We review a whole bunch of external hard drives here. I mean it wouldn’t really be a review site for the best external hard drives for Mac if we didn’t, but in all of the cases we suggest getting your external hard drive from Amazon (if you didn’t get that from the yellow buttons with their name on it). That’s not because we’re too lazy to look around, or because we like the name (although we do, I mean face it – it’s a pretty cool name). It’s because they have the lowest prices for external hard drives and their delivery times are excellent. Everyone knows Amazon, they’ve been around for years now which means you don’t have to deal with any shady online shops.

Now we’re not saying you should laugh at your local PC shop and tell them Amazon will put them out of business. They’ll still do pretty well because most people still don’t realise they can get things cheaper online (most people will buy from in there because they don’t really know what they’re looking for – they won’t bother to find some reviews online and get the best external hard drive for Mac rather than over paying for whatever the shop attendant tells them to get). It’s sometimes worth looking in there, they might have a good deal on but, for the most part, getting things online is cheaper and easier and you’re likely to get a better deal.

I use the internet to shop for pretty much everything these days, and finding the best external hard drive for Mac should be no different.