best thunderbolt 3 ssd external hard drive for mac

A two-month membership to Adobe's Creative Cloud Photography Plan means it's the best external hard drive for Mac for budding photographers as well. This program can help you wrangle your photo library if you don't already use some photo managing tool. Seagate also throws in a one-year complimentary subscription to Mylio Create. No matter how you back up your Mac, the Seagate Ultra Touch HDD has you covered.

The Seagate Ultra Touch HDD is the best external hard drive for your best Mac because you can carry it around with you at all times, it's formatted for both Mac and Windows right out of the box, and its easy-to-use software can automatically complete backups for you as often or as little as you want. If you need blazing fast speeds for giant files, the Samsung X5 is a monster external SSD that can handle any workload. This is so you can take advantage of the fast speeds on your Mac or MacBook Pro, and it doesn't need any formatting, so it's plug and play! This SSD comes with Thunderbolt 3 technology included. Plus, the internal frame on the inside is shock-resistant for drops from two meters. Its read and write speeds are 2,800MB/s and 2,300MB/s, respectively, and the entire body is made of metal, making it much tougher than plastic drives. If you're used to dealing with giant file sizes and need a hard drive that can handle transfer data fast, the Samsung X5 is one of the fastest SSDs you'll find. Best capacity: SanDisk Professional G-Drive (12TB) It's fast enough for photographers and videographers to transfer their work. The Samsung T7 is the best option if you need speeds. However, it's worth noting that you'll be paying more for SSDs than HDDs, hence the expensive price here. Plus, if you're worried about encryption, the Samsung T7 Portable SSD has you covered with an optional password to launch the drive and AES 256-bit hardware encryption on all your files. And it should be able to store all your photo and video files with ease thanks to its straightforward software. There's more than enough speed and power to transfer any file with up to 1,050 MB/s read speeds and 1,000 MB/s write speeds.

SSDs tend to be much faster than HDDs, so if you need speeds, this is our pick.

This small compact SSD drive from Samsung comes with both a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-C to USB-A, meaning it's perfect to use with your MacBook or Mac.

Best thunderbolt 3 ssd external hard drive for mac