best external hard drive pc and mac compatible

The SSD will give off some heat, and the My Passport SSD does feel noticeably warm during long backup sessions. Backup times on Mac and PC were commendable, taking about an hour for a full backup of a 128GB drive via Time Machine. Those are speeds you’d normally get on your internal drive. To put that in real terms, we were able to move a 4.5GB HD video file in about 15 seconds and a 6.5GB 4K video in about 30 seconds. While the drive did at times peak at the manufacturer’s claimed 1050Mbps for read times and 1000Mbps for write times, speeds of 700Mbps in either direction were more typical. In our testing, we dropped it on carpet, wood flooring, fake wood flooring, tile and concrete and noted only faint scratches on the outer shell without any damage to the actual function of the drive. Though a compact beauty, it still handles drops of up to 6.5 feet, as stated by the manufacturer. You can also easily tuck it into a sleeve holding your laptop. The WD My Passport SSD is an easily portable drive and fits in front or back jeans pockets or even a shirt pocket. To that end, we think you’ll be more inclined to keep a drive with a slim build in a fun color out and accessible, rather than stuffed in a drawer and forgotten. Half the battle with getting in the habit of backing up your computer is plugging in the drive and actually doing the task. ( Note: if you're looking for a portable hard drive, which are smaller, cheaper and more rugged, check out the Western Digital's My Passport or SanDisk's Extreme Portable SSD.Your CNN account Log in to your CNN account Sure, external hard drives need more desk space and they’re less portable, but knowing the things you need are secure - that’s priceless. Plus, they often come with a bandwidth cap. Even if you have a really fast internet connection, the transfer speeds with cloud services can’t compete with today’s external hard drives. With cloud services you hand over all responsibility for your photos, documents and other data to that storage provider with an external hard drive, you’re in the driver’s seat.įinally, there's speed. You might be thinking, why would anybody invest in an external hard drive when you could just use a cheap cloud-based service, like 1Drive or iCloud? Well, there are a number of reasons.įirst, an external hard drive is a one-time fee and while it'll be a more expensive upfront cost, it will less expensive in the long run - those monthly subscription fees add up.

Or secondly, if you want to backup your various digital files (photos, videos, music) so that if something happens to your computer (maybe it breaks or gets stolen), you don't lose everything.

First, your laptop or desktop is running out storage space it's a common problem, especially if your computer is several years old.

There are two main reasons why you'd buy an external hard drive.

Best external hard drive pc and mac compatible