
We'll start with a breakdown of our favorite external drives for Macs, followed by a guide to how to shop for the best one for you. Read on as we solve this and all of your other Mac external-storage quandaries. In fact, in many cases it makes sense to choose an inexpensive non-Thunderbolt drive that isn't targeted toward Mac use. So what's a Mac user to do who just wants to back up his or her files using Time Machine, or stash a large video collection? Spoiler: A Thunderbolt drive isn't your only option far from it. As a result, they are typically external SSDs, or even multidrive RAID arrays, which means they also tend to be expensive. The main difference is that many drives made specifically for Macs use the upgraded Thunderbolt data transfer protocol, which promises super-fast data transfers for photographers and video editors who need to store mountains of footage and access it very quickly. Most laptops with either operating system now come with at least one oval-shaped USB-C port, and it's the one you'll want to use for connecting your external drive. Remember, the files you should move to the new drive depend on the type of drive you’ve got.Buying an external hard drive or SSD for your Mac is not all that different from buying one for your Windows PC. Once you’ve got your backups in order, it’s time to start clearing up some room on your computer’s internal drive! You can do this by moving your sample library, Kontakt instruments, project files, and any other files that don’t need to be on your computer to your external drive.

However, to be extra safe we recommend buying a couple of drives and using the 3-2-1 method, which you can learn more about here.

This way, if anything happens to your computer you have all of your files safe and ready to go on a drive that can be stored in your closet, in a drawer, or even at your parent’s house.īy doing this, you reduce the risk that your hard drive will crash and erase all of your precious music production tools and projects. Well, for starters, you should be backing up all of your digital files to at least one external drive regularly. So, once you’ve picked out a hard drive, how do you start using it?
