Best external hard drives for Mac in 2024

The performance of the Mac is probably the most important aspect of buying a new computer. The second is almost certainly going to be storage capacity.

However, while you can configure storage at the time of purchase, you don't have the opportunity to add any more internally. The exception is the Mac Pro, but that is an oddly specialist device in the Apple range.

If users want more storage, they have a few options. For a start, they could consider trading in and upgrading their Mac, though this is very inefficient.

Cloud storage is always a possibility, but that does rely on you having Internet access. That, and it's very slow compared to local storage.

The best option, therefore, is to acquire some external storage for your Mac. For desktop Macs, it makes a lot of sense since the drives aren't being moved around like you would for the MacBook Pro.

What follows is AppleInsider's best picks for drives of various kinds that you can attach to your Mac and boost your storage capacity.

Best durable external Mac hard drive - Lacie Rugged USB-C External Hard Drive

Lacie is best known for its bright orange storage drives. Protected by a thick rubber bumper, the drives are capable of taking a knock and keeping your data safe.

This can include four-foot drops, rain, and even crush resistance to one ton. This all helps prevent your drive and your precious data from becoming useless in an accident.

However, while it too has moved on to using SSDs, it still offers hard drive options. These provide higher capacities at lower cost to consumers per gigabyte.

Transfer-wise, you're going to expect maximum transfer speeds of 130MB/s over its USB-C and Thunderbolt-compatible connection. It will also work with an iPad or iPhone's USB-C port.

If the protective nature of the drive isn't enough, there's also extra protection in the form of three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services coverage.

The Lacie Rugged USB-C External Hard Drive starts from $89.99 for a 1TB model, rising to $189.99 on Amazon for the 5TB version.

Best Thunderbolt external Mac hard drive - SanDisk Professional G-Drive Project

It's one thing to have a large capacity drive connected up, but you also need speed. For projects with large volumes of data in use, such as video editing, speed is as essential as capacity.

The SanDisk Professional G-Drive Project is an external hard drive that connects over Thunderbolt 3, enabling it to take advantage of the 40Gbps of bandwidth using its pair of ports.

The initial included drive is a 7,200rpm Ultrastar enterprise-class hard disk, making it good for long-term storage. However, it only offers access speeds of up to 250MB/s.

To get more speed, you can add a Pro-Blade SSD Mag to the dedicated slot. By adding an SSD, transfer speeds shoot up to as much a 10Gbps.

All this is held inside a premium anodized aluminum housing aimed at reducing temperatures while still looking good on the desk.

The SanDisk Professional G-Drive Project starts from $359.99 for 6TB on Amazon, with capacities rising up to 24TB for $929.99.

Best large capacity multiple-drive device for Mac - OWC ThunderBay 4

One answer to the data problem is to have a Network Attached Storage device, which usually contains numerous drives. However, you could also get enclosures that do the same thing, but are directly attached to the Mac instead of the slower network.

The OWC ThunderBay 4 is an example of this, in that it is a four-bay enclosure for 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. Able to be filled with SSDs or hard disks, it has a heat-dissipating aluminum chassis, and is even pretested by OWC with a multi-hour burn-in test.

You can mix and match the drives depending on your storage needs. It also offers RAID configurations in RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, and 1+0, so you can have the storage configured for speed or redundancy in various ways.

At its optimum with the fastest drives it can use, you can expect to see up to 1,527MB/s sustained transfer speeds. It connects to your Mac using Thunderbolt, with it also able to be part of a daisy chain of Thunderbolt devices.

You can get the enclosure without drives for $449.99 at Amazon. Configurations with drives start from 8TB for $979, rising to $2,649.99 for 80TB on OWC

Best dual-purpose external Mac drive - Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock

An external drive doesn't usually offer much beyond storage. However, you can pick up docks that provide storage capabilities, saving you from using another port.

The Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock is one such device, as it takes the form of a powerful dock with many ports. For a start, there are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, with one used to connect to the host device.

The ports list includes a pair of USB-A 10-gig and USB-C 10-gig ports and HDMI 2.1 on the back, along with a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet connection, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and RCA outputs. The front also has two more USB-C 10-gig ports, two USB-A, a 3.5mm headphone jack again, and a memory card reader.

Hey for this article is underneath, as there's a removable panel. Here, you can place an M.2 SSD or NVMe stick, which provides a lot of fast storage, depending on what you put in there.

In practice, after trying out an assortment of NVMe drives, we saw transfer speeds for reads and writes at around 2,500MB/s.

Sold without drives, the Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock is priced at $299.99 at B&H.

Best simple external hard drive for Mac - Seagate Expansion External Hard Drive

If you want storage but you don't need the bells and whistles, you could simply get a very basic drive. If speed isn't a priority but capacity and pricing are, then the Seagate Expansion series could be for you.

It's a basic black box enclosure containing a hard drive, that sits on or near to your desk. It connects to a Mac using a USB 3.0 cable so it will also hook up to other devices using the common connection type too.

It does work with both Windows and Mac desktops right out of the box, without any need to configure it at all. However, you will have to format it if you want to use it with Time Machine.

If all goes wrong with the drive, such as water damage or a natural disaster, Seagate does offer rescue services to retrieve your data.

The Seagate Expansion External Hard Drive range starts from $149 for 6TB on Amazon, with capacities rising to 18TB.

Best network-attached storage for Mac users - Terramaster F4-424

A NAS can have its uses in many different ways, with the chief one being to allow multiple devices access to a data source. It's also handy as a semi-distant place to store backups on your network, so it can be a safe distance away from the Mac if anything goes wrong.

The Terramaster F4-424 NAS is a four-bay version, capable of taking up to four 18TB hard drives in one go. That means you can have up to 72 terabytes of storage available on the network.

It is also able to be configured in various modes, including RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD, Single, and TRIAD. This gives a lot of options when it comes to speed and protecting the stored data.

To help increase speed, there's also a pair of M.2 interfaces, so you can attach two NVMe drives to the setup for even more capacity. Using a pair of 2.5GbE ports with link aggregation, it's capable of a linear data transmission speed of 283MB/s over the network.

It uses an N95 quad-core CPU with an integrated UHD GPU, and 8GB of memory, allowing it to run various applications for users.

The Terramaster F4-424 is available for $499.99 at Amazon, without drives.