best 4tb external hard drive for macbook pro

Any higher performance port today should be USB-C-just remember that just because it’s USB-C doesn’t mean the actual electronics inside the PC or drive can hit the highest speeds of what a USB-C port can do.

For example, for data transfers from an external drive, a USB-C port could mean everything from USB 2.0 High Speed (480Mbps) to USB 3.2 SuperSpeed 20Gbps as well as USB4 and Thunderbolt 3. What is carried over the wires varies greatly. Keep in mind, USB-C refers only to the connector itself. You see it in everything from phones to laptops. USB-C is the latest of the USB connectors the world is coalescing around. Type B ports are becoming rare, though you might find one on enclosures supporting 5.25-inch hard drives or optical drives. USB 3 Type-B is the larger, blocky version of USB 3.0 Micro B. It’ll do 5Gbps and is fine for hard drives and SATA (internally) SSDs. It’s actually the same Micro USB port used on your phone, but beefed up with more data lines to hit USB 3.0 speeds. This is still a very common port on many lower-cost portable and desktop external hard drives today. PortsĮxternal drives come with a variety of ports, though they’re gradually consolidating on the Type-C connector. The bottom drive features USB-C or USB Type C. The Orange drive features both a SuperSpeed Micro B and Thunderbolt 2 (mini DisplayPort connector). The second drive features the connector that replaced it: Micro B SuperSpeed. The top drive uses the older, slower Mini-USB interface. While the desktop drive provides a far higher capacity, they also require more cables, weigh more, and generally may not be quite as shock resistant as a portable hard drive that’s designed to take a few more bumps, even when on. Having more storage allows you to keep more historical files should you need them or use the same drive to backup additional PCs.

If you have 1TB of storage in your PC, 2TB will allow you to make a full backup while keeping historical backups on the same drive. So how much do you need? We recommend a backup drive at least twice as large as the total capacity of your PC. The best “value” are typically for the largest hard drives as you can see, but it brings considerably higher prices and not everyone needs that much capacity. It’s almost equally as bad on the WD Elements Portable drive. You’re paying more than twice as much for the lowest-capacity drive versus the next step up. You can see that below where we compare the popular WD Elements desktop hard drive’s available capacities and prices.

Best 4tb external hard drive for macbook pro