Best external harddrive for mac games how to#

Also note that a recent Silverstone Raven SSD enclosure works with both SATA and NVMe drives.

Best external harddrive for mac games 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: