#Best external ssd for mac 2016 how to#
#Best external ssd for mac 2016 upgrade#
#Best external ssd for mac 2016 portable#

Just make sure you get an enclosure that matches your drive, be that SATA or NVMe. It's only available in capacities up to 1TB, but it's plenty speedy for external storage, and the more spacious model is already selling for as little as $115 at various online outlets. And if you're keen on building your own speedy external SSD but don't have a drive handy to use, the recent WD Blue SN550 is a good candidate for that task.

#Best external ssd for mac 2016 portable#

If you have a SATA-based M.2 drive that you'd like to turn into a portable drive, Silverstone's MS09 enclosure lets you do just that. Dozens of 2.5-inch drive enclosures can be found online for between $10-$25 (£15-25) that will let you drop in an old drive easily, and turn it into an external hard drive or SSD.Īnd if you have an M.2 drive that you've swapped out of a gaming laptop, ultrabook or upgraded away from in your gaming PC, we've recently looked at NVMe enclosures from MyDigitalSSD and Pluggable. Read: 16TB Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q SSD Review Interface ShorthandĪlso note that, if you have a spare drive, you can easily make your own portable drive. But if you can't spend as much and/or you need USB support as well as Thunderbolt, one of the lower-capacity XTRM-Q drives will serve you better. At this price, nothing else compares to the sheer capacity and performance that it provides. But its Intel Optane-like cost of $2,899.99 makes the 16TB Rocket XTRM-Q is not just one of the highest-capacity storage devices we have tested, but also one of the most expensive. While the original XTRM-Q contained one Rocket Q M.2 NVMe SSD within, the new 16TB model has two of them behind a slightly different Thunderbolt 3 bridge, providing a ton of fast flash storage and potentially bus-saturating performance for those who need it. The new variant doubles capacity to 16TB, but it isn’t quite as portable as the 8TB model due to its larger form factor and power requirements. We thought that 8TB of flash storage was niche and extreme enough for most prosumers and enthusiasts when we first reviewed Sabrent’s 8TB Rocket XTRM-Q, but now the company is doubling down and pushing capacity to new limits with its 16TB model. Sabrent has pushed the boundaries of fast flash and high capacity with its recent SSDs, surpassing the biggest names in the industry. Short 3-year warranty for the price -Slow write speed after write cache fills -Runs warm, but within spec -No USB support

#Best external ssd for mac 2016 upgrade#

So if you opt for that model, you'll have far more drive options, or can upgrade later to a speedier drive.īest External Hard Drives and Portable SSDs You Can Buy Today Also note that a recent Silverstone Raven SSD enclosure works with both SATA and NVMe drives.

#Best external ssd for mac 2016 how to#

There are several enclosures available, and we've detailed how to build your external SSD here. You Can Save Money By Making Your Own Portable SSD. If you're even a little tech savvy, you can buy an external SSD enclosure and use an old M.2 drive you might have around from a laptop or desktop upgrade, or buy one that you see on sale.Because hardware failure is always possible, and portable drives are often small enough to lose or leave behind by accident.

Portable SSDs are better here, but you should still keep your irreplacable data backed up on a desktop drive and / or on a cloud service.

Don’t Use a Portable Hard Drive as Your Only Backup. Portable hard drives are made up of spinning glass or metal platters, making them a poor choice as a primary backup of your data-especially if you carry them around.

But if you need cavernous amounts of external storage, a hard drive is a better option for most, as multi-terabyte external SSDs sell for several hundred dollars, but 4TB portable hard drives can sell for under $100 (£90). A portable SSD will also be much faster at reading and writing lots of data.

If you don’t need terabytes of storage and you often travel with your drive, a portable SSD is worth paying extra for. But they’re also much slower and more fragile than solid-state drives.

Portable Hard Drive or SSD? Drives that have spinning storage platters inside are very affordable, with 1TB models often selling for under $50 (£40).

When shopping for an external drive or SSD, consider the following: