My Passport For Mac Size10/22/2021
Youll need a drive that is at least the same size as your Macs internal drive. Cons.Connect an external hard drive to your Mac. Available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1 and 2TB sizes. Shock-, water-, and dust-resistant. Comes with a carabiner hole.
My Passport Size Portable Drive InIDGThe 1TB drive may seem like the best deal, but in terms of price per gigabyte, the 4TB and 5TB drives are far better deals. Keep in mind, this is one drive on one day (May 13, 2021), and just one vendor, Amazon, but it illustrates the point. In fact, dollar for dollar, cheaper low-capacity drives are most often the worst deal.For example, we compared prices of the WD My Passport portable drive in its 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 5TB capacities. However, while you might think that the lowest-cost drive provides the most value, it often doesn’t. Capacity and priceFor most consumers, the main shopping concerns for external storage are capacity and price.See the discussion on backup below. Remember, if you’re storing important data, you need a backup—online, or if the data is copious, on a second drive. Save your pennies and get one, or two of the larger drives.Don’t worry about Gen 2, 10Gbps, or Thunderbolt with single hard drive enclosures.Where Superspeed 10Gbps/20Gbps, USB4, or Thunderbolt will definitely help is with the aforementioned RAID setups, or more likely—an SSD. For the sake of brevity (and sanity), we generally shorten those names to USB 10Gbps, or 10Gbps USB, for instance.No hard drive, unless combined in RAID with others, can outstrip the 5Gbps (roughly 500MBps real world after overhead) throughput of USB 3.1 Gen 1. In an attempt to simplify things, the USB Forum has recently changed the nomenclature to indicate throughput speed–Superspeed USB 5Gbps, Superspeed USB 10Gbps, and Superspeed USB 20Gbps–because performance is a priority for most uses. Beyond that simple statement, the story gets confusing—largely because of the plethora of variations: USB 3.0, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps, which is basically USB 3.0), USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps), and USB 3.1 Gen 2×2 (20Gbps), and now USB 3.2 and USB4.IDG/Gordon Mah UngThe top drive uses the older, slower Mini-USB interface. A 1TB Samsung T5 on USB is only $125.To summarize: USB 5Gbps/10Gbps is cheaper and fast enough for most users and applications. There aren’t a lot of 2×2 ports out there, but these drives will also work with USB4 at the same 20Gbps pace.Thunderbolt has always come at a premium. Our recommended portable, the Samsung Portable SSD X5, is also $200 for 500GB of capacity. A SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD that is our runner-up for portable storage can be had for $90 in a 500GB capacity.Now it’s Superspeed USB 20Gbps (Gen 2×2) that’s the high-priced blend, with the Seagate Firecuda Gaming SSD costing $200 for the same 500GB of storage. It’s actually the same Micro USB port used on your phone, but beefed up with more data lines to hit USB 3.0 speeds. This is still a very common port on portable backup hard drives today. Here’s what you need to care about:USB 3 Micro-B Superspeed. PortsExternal drives come with a variety of ports, though they’re gradually consolidating on the Type-C connector. The bottom drive features USB-C or USB Type C. The Orange drive features both a SuperSpeed Micro B and Thunderbolt 2 (mini DisplayPort connector). The mere fact that it’s also used for Thunderbolt 3/4 should clue you in.The bottom line is, if you see the Lightning icon next to a Type-C port, you can attach Thunderbolt 3/4 and USB (Thunderbolt supports USB) drives. It’s used by USB, but otherwise tells you nothing about the level or iteration of USB involved. The USB Forum would now like it known as USB-C, which is just as confusing. The technology currently supports up to 40Gbps (80Gbps has been mentioned), and it’s backward-compatible all the way to USB 1.1 via adapters.Type-C is a spec for a cable and connector, not for the USB protocol itself. There’s no need to invest in a Thunderbolt 2 drive unless it’s for legacy support issues.Note that Apple makes a bi-directional Thunderbolt 1/2 to 3 adapter if you need to connect the one to the other. Using the mini-DisplayPort connector, it only really gained popularity on Macs, and even Apple put it out to pasture in 2017. The reason we mention it is that, any drive with a Type-C port should come with a Type-C to Type-A cable or adapter.Thunderbolt 2 is at this point, a dead port. MacBooks have no logo, but their Type-C ports are Thunderbolt.USB Type-A You won’t find this port on any drive, but you will on PCs and laptops. If there’s no logo, check the documentation. It states that you should always maintain three copies of your irreplaceable data: the original data, a backup, and a backup of the backup. A second drive as backup?In backup, there’s a fundamental maxim appropriately named the Rule of Three. As with Thunderbolt 2, the only reason to invest in an eSATA drive is for use with older computers. USB 3.0 put the last nail in its coffin. Created for attaching external storage to your computer’s SATA bus, eSATA was a cheap way in its day to get beyond the 60MBps performance of USB 2.0. You’ll need a powered dock for that.ESATA is another legacy port that’s basically disappeared. Older Asus Thunderbolt EX 3 and ATI graphics cards is shown. IDG/Gordon Mah UngOur storage testbed is a Core i7-5820K with 64GB of RAM on an Asus X99 Deluxe board. True patrons of wisdom might even take the second drive to work, so there’s no chance of losing both drives to the same local disaster. However, for vast photo, audio, and/or video collections,external drives in pairs (or more), are a faster, more practical solution.Create complete backups alternately to the two drives every few months. Movie decrypter for macAn Asus USB 3.1/10Gbps (Asmedia 1142 controller) card was employed for some of the older drives on the chart. It’s a six-core (twelve-thread) Intel Core i7-5820K on an Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard with 64GB of Kingston DDR4 memory running Windows 10.A discrete Gigabyte Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt 3 card and Ableconn USB 3.2 2×2 20Gbps card (Asmedia 2142 controller) are used for connecting the external drives. How we testedWe use our standard storage test bed to evaluate the performance of every external drive we review.
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