Anyone who uses a PC should have an external drive. It’s not only a useful means of data backup and storage, it also allows you to transport files from your desktop or laptop to another device.
- Nas Drive For Mac
- Apple Vs Windows Pros And Cons
- Best Nas Storage For Mac And Pc
- Pc Matic For Apple Computers
- Best Nas For Both Mac And Pc
- Best Nas For Mac Users
- Best Nas For Mac And Itunes
Xbox One X users, as well, would be wise to invest in an external drive as a way of augmenting the console’s measly 1TB hard drive (the external drive needs to be USB 3.0-compatible and will be formatted when you insert the drive).
8 Best Personal Cloud Storage NAS Device for Mac 2018: Good reviews NAS for Mac Below are the Devices that are great options for who are looking for and interested in build your NAS server at home or office. The 7 Best NAS (Network Attached Storage) to Buy in 2018. Best mac lipsticks for everyday wear. Search the site GO. Buying Guides. Computers & Tablets. “The best NAS money can buy. Add in extras such as Mac and Windows compatibility and 256-AES encryption and you’ll find plenty of reasons to grab this backup device for all the peace of mind you need. Top five affordable NAS servers: Home backup made easy. CNET editor Dong Ngo picks his top five advanced affordable NAS servers for home networking backup.
The best external drives 2019
- WD My Passport 4TB: Best external backup drive [amazon.com]
- Samsung T5 SSD: Best external performance drive [amazon.com]
- Samsung Portable SSD X5: Best portable Thunderbolt 3 drive [samsung.com]
The question is, which external drive is right for you? To answer that, we’ve combed through our reviews of both external hard disks and SSDs to pick the top drives we’ve tested. We’ll also walk you through what you need to know to buy the best external drive for your needs.
Updated March 27, 2019 to add two reviews that put style on an equal footing with performance.
- The G-Technology G-Drive mobile USB-C external drive (available on Amazon) performs well, and G-Technology always delivers attractive designs that seem intended to harmonize with Apple products. Alas, along with the Apple design cues, comes an relatively Apple-like price. Read our full review.
- The Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch (available on Amazon) is a svelte drive that sports an attractive basket-weave polyester fabric, as well as good benchmark results. The price is pretty affordable, too. Read our full review.
Best external backup drive
Lots of storage for less than the competition, attractive styling, and good performance with small files highlight this USB 3.0 portable hard drive. An excellent bargain.
Our pick for best portable external backup drive for 2017 is Western Digital’s My Passport 4TB drive. Although it’s a tick or two slower than other backup drives (like our runner-up, for example) in sequential file writing (think copying movie files), it does better at writing small files (think hundreds of Word or Excel documents.) It’s not flashy or super-fast, but for most people who only whip it out once a month to run backups and then shove it back into a drawer, those things don’t matter as much as the capacity, price, and reasonable performance. (Read our full review.)
Runner-up
If capacity and portability are your primary concerns, and the Backup Plus Portable fits up to 5TB in pretty much a standard 2.5-inch USB external package. It's fast with large files, but on the slow side with small ones. Regardless, it's a worthy drive that gives you more space for your movies and games.
Our runner-up for this popular category is Seagate’s slightly larger and somewhat faster Backup Plus Portable. Like the WD above, it’s a USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) drive. It tops out at 5TB in a single drive and can also be had in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. There’s even a “fast” 4TB version that uses two hard drives in RAID for more performance.
In our tests of the 4TB version, we found the Seagate to be slightly faster with large file transfers (think movies) but worse with small file transfers (think Office documents). It’s still a worthy runner-up, though. (Read our full review.)
Best performance USB drive
The T5 is easily the fastest non-RAID portable USB SSD we've tested. It makes full use of its Gen 2, 3.1 interface while retaining the svelte profile of the T3. A winner for sure.
Remember that scene in Office Space where Peter Gibbons is desperately trying to save files to disk before getting out of the office? Yeah, mmkay. If you need ultra-fast performance in a package that you can put in your pocket, look no further than Samsung’s new T5 . Not much larger than a book of matches, the T5 comes in sizes from 500GB to 2TB. The best part is its speed. The drive features a USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) over USB Type C.
And no, unlike most USB “thumb drives” this baby doesn’t hit the wall when writing files. It can write 20GB of files in just 110 seconds. If it’s a single large file, it’ll write it in 58 seconds. (Read our full review.)
The Extreme Portable SSD's convenient form factor trumps the drive's slight performance deficit compared to the Samsung T5. With its fast USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) capability, this is currently our favorite portable SSD.
Runner-up
The new drive here is the runner-up, which some may consider an even better pick than the Samsung T5: The Sandisk Extreme Portable. You can read our review of it here, where we give it 4.5 stars and an Editor’s Choice Award. It’s a seriously fast USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) drive, just not quite as fast as the Samsung T5.
You might still choose it instead of the Samsung T5 because it’s more comfortable with its rubberized grip finish. It comes with a nifty combo cable that adapts to old-school square USB Type A and also works with USB-C ports.
The Sandisk Extreme Portable displaces the Sandisk Extreme 900 drive, but we think it’s a fair decision because the Extreme 900 is, well, pricey. At $700 for 1.92TB, it’s hard to justify over the Extreme Portable’s $521 for 2TB.
Best portable Thunderbolt 3 drive
Portable Thunderbolt 3 drives have been long overdue, but we’re happy to recommend Samsung’s new Portable SSD X5 drive. The full review is on our sister site Macworld, but let’s just say it’s stupidly fast and kinda like putting a scorching Samsung 970 Pro in an enclosure that fits in your pocket and not giving up much performance at all.
Notice that we don’t say “best portable performance Thunderbolt 3 drive,” because by very definition, a Thunderbolt 3 drive should be blazingly fast. The only reason we’re not universally recommending the Portable SSD X5 is the relative rarity of Thunderbolt 3 ports on PCs. You’d need to be driving a brand-new Dell XPS 13 or HP Spectre x360 13 to be able to use Thunderbolt 3.
What you need to know before you buy
Capacity and price
External-drive shopping can pull you deep into specs and features, but the most important two numbers for consumers are capacity and price. Many assume the lowest-cost drive gets you the most value, but it often doesn’t. In fact, dollar for dollar, it’s often the worst deal.
For example, we took the WD Black My Passport portable drive and compared the prices of the 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB drive, on capacity and price. Keep in mind, this is one drive on one day (July 11, 2017), and just one vendor, Amazon, but it illustrates the point.
![Best Nas For Mac And Pc Best Nas For Mac And Pc](/uploads/1/3/3/8/133894568/539250794.png)
If you look at the chart above, you can see the worst deal is that $58 1TB HDD, while the 4TB nets the most storage capacity for the money. Here are the same numbers in a bar chart form:
So yes, if you’re buying an external drive, you pay more for the lowest capacity. However, this doesn’t mean you should automatically shell out for that 4TB drive. In the end, it still costs more. If you really don’t need the storage capacity of a 4TB drive, put that extra $57 toward something you actually do need.
Interface
The vast majority of drives today are USB drives. From there it gets confusing. Today, the flavors include: USB 3.0, USB SuperSpeed, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (which is basically USB 3.0), and USB 3.1 Gen 2.
For the most part, it doesn’t matter which of these versions you get (beware the much older USB 2.0, though). USB 3.0 allows transfer speeds up to 5Gbps, as does USB 3.1 Gen 1. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is the fastest USB version and can move data up to 10Gbps. No single hard drive today can surpass the throughput of USB 3.1 Gen 1, though. The sleight of hand to watch for is if a drive vendor lists “USB 3.1” in the specs without specifying Gen 1 or Gen 2.
The only place Gen 2 can help is with an SSD. The good news is that while USB 3.1 Gen 2 used to be only in crazy expensive SSD external drives, it’s fairly affordable today. A Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD that is our runner up for portable storage can be had for $125 in a 500GB capacity.
Ports
External drives come with a variety of confusing and esoteric ports. Here’s what you need to care about.
USB 3.0 Micro B port is the most common port on portable backup drives today. It’s basically the same Micro USB port used on your phone, but beefed up with more connectors to hit USB 3.0 speeds. It’ll hit 5Gbps and for everything but the fastest portable SSDs is still fine.
USB 3.0 Type B port is the larger, blocky version of USB 3.0 Micro B. USB 3.0 Type B is often used in larger external drive enclosures. As its name implies, it’ll hit USB 3.0 speeds at up to 5Gbps.
USB Type C is the newest of the USB connectors and features a nifty reversible design that’s being used on phones, tablets, and PCs. Its most important feature is that it supports up to 10Gbps transfer speeds. The key phrase here is “up to.” USB Type C is just the connector and port on the drive (or phone), but the rules allow USB Type C to support transfer speeds from USB 2.0’s 480Mbps to USB 3.0’s 5Gbps and USB 3.1’s 10Gbps. So don’t caught up thinking that because a drive you buy has this nifty new interface and port, you’ll get awesome speeds. And no, hooking up a hard drive to a USB Type C port doesn’t make anything faster.
Outside the theoretical speed advantage of USB Type C is a power advantage. A standard USB Type C port on your desktop or laptop should be able to support a minimum of 15 watts, so you should be able to run larger, more power-hungry drives.
Thunderbolt 3 was designed as one cable to rule them all, and it’s rapidly looking like it will. The port basically adopts a USB Type C port and connector but also offers the ability to run pure PCIe at up to 40Gbps. For the performance-minded, Thunderbolt 3 is the natural alternative. One negative, though: It ain’t cheap. Our recommended portable, the Samsung Portable SSD X5 is $697 for 1TB of capacity. A 1TB Samsung T5 on USB is only $278.
There’s no reason to pay extra for a Thunderbolt 3 drive unless it’s high-performance. A Thunderbolt 3 portable hard drive would be a complete waste of time and money for most people.
Nas Drive For Mac
Thunderbolt 2 is, at this point, a dying port. Using a miniDisplayPort connector, it only really gained popularity on Macintosh PCs and is now being put out to pasture. Unless you have an older Mac, there’s really no need to invest in a pricier Thunderbolt 2 drive or port today unless it’s for legacy support issues.
eSATA is another mostly dead port. Made as an extension of SATA, eSATA was a cheap way to get beyond the 60MBps performance of USB 2.0. USB 3.0 put the last nail in its coffin, though, so you can ignore this port today. Like Thunderbolt 2, the only reason to invest in an eSATA drive is for use with older computers.
Buy two?
There’s an old saying that “one is none and two is one.” You can apply that phrase to space capsule oxygen tanks, plane engines, or whatever mission critical system you depend on, including hard drives.
The philosophy on external drives used for backup is that copying 10 years’ worth of photos onto an external drive and then erasing it on your PC’s local drive isn’t actually a backup at all. If that drive gets chewed up by the dog or otherwise dies, you’ve lost it all.
If you’re paranoid about backups, consider getting two backup drives, possibly in different colors, and then alternating complete backups of your PC to the drives every few month. This should mitigate data loss should a drive die. Truly paranoid people will even take the second drive to work so there’s no chance of losing both drives to the same local disaster.
How we tested
We use our standard storage test bed to evaluate the performance of the drives we review. It’s an Intel six-core Core i7-5820K on an Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard with a Thunderbolt 3 card and 32GB of RAM running Windows 8.1. We use various synthetic benchmarks including Crystal Disk Mark 5, AS SSD, and Iometer. We also use a manual file-copy test where 20GB of small files and another 20GB single file are written to and read from the storage drive. The test bed boots to a plain SATA drive, but all targets and sources for drive performance use a 24GB RAM disk.
We also use an Asus Thunder EX3 discrete Thunderbolt 3 card and Asus USB 3.1 10Gbps card for testing. The Asus card uses an Asmedia 1142 controller.
Our external drive reviews
If you’d like to learn more about our top picks as well as other options, you can find links below to all the external drives we’ve reviewed. We’ll keep evaluating new ones on a regular basis, so be sure to check back to see what other drives we’ve put through their paces.
Active4 years ago
Please share your experiences and reviews about NAS (Network-Attached Storage) below. In particular, rate their compatibility with Macs, OS X, iTunes, Time Machine, AppleTV, and other Apple-specific tools. The goal is for future users to be able to easily find the best Mac-compatible NAS appliance.
Rules:
Apple Vs Windows Pros And Cons
- Use a single answer for each NAS (no duplicates, please).
- Vote (up or down) on any NAS you have experience with.
Also welcome: useful reference links, such as this one from xlr8yourmac.com.
14 Answers
Synology DiskStation
The Synology DSM software has built-in support for Macs including Apple Fileshare Protocol (afp) and Time Machine support. It has an iTunes server in addition to a regular DLNA Media server. As it is Linux based it is easy to configure the NAS to do rsync backups (ssh login).
It has a great web-based desktop-style interface that is very easy to understand and use. The DSM software is constantly being updated and improved.
They have solutions from 2-disk on up to 15-disk. You can find the 4-disk DS411j without drives for less than $400.
A Mac
My NAS of choice is an old Mac. In my case, I had an old MacBook that wouldn't hold a charge anymore so I rigged up an eSATA connection to my 2TB external drive.
The advantages to using an actual Mac over a true NAS system:
- Uses first-party AFP on HFS for optimal compatibility. In particular, it supports Spotlight and fast file searches (CatSearch), something that other NAS systems cannot do as well: They usually use a Linux system with netatalk and an ext3 file system which, compared to AFP with HFS, are not optimized for the ways a Mac can search. For more technical information on this, see the Find Any File FAQ, What kind of disks do support 'fast search'?
Further features to consider:
- Can serve as a Time Machine backup volume (some other NAS can do that as well).
- Works great as an iTunes master library, connected to my Apple TV and my other Macs via Home Sharing.
- Can run a BitTorrent client to download Linux ISOs and Stack Overflow data dumps (some other NAS can do that as well).
- Use built-in screen sharing to control.
Drobo FS
The Drobo FS is my new favourite NAS. I've run a Netgear ReadyNAS and a PC-based NAS in the past and neither touch the Drobo FS for simplicity, speed and reliability. The ReadyNAS suffered from poor RAID performance, especially on reboots when volumes needed to be scanned. And the power supply in it was really lame. And the PC-based NAS was just a pain to maintain and costly to keep up.
The Drobo FS is super simple to set up. Has very, very good volume build and scanning speeds on startup. Has what has to be the best hot-swapping of any multi-disk unit I've ever seen that was in the sub-$10k range. And performs like a champ while drawing very little power.
I now run an FS for home sharing and an old Drobo hangs off my iMac for audio project data. They are teh awesome.
The Time Capsule can be used as a shared drive.
It is also a Wi-Fi router, and is automatically recognized as a backup device for Time Machine.
Freenas using generic hardware
I love the ability to grab an old computer, fill it full of cheap hard drives, and install Freenas on a CF card or USB drive. Software RAID is reliable.
A key point, if any of the hardware dies, the RAID array can be rebuilt when the software is installed on new hardware, unlike some proprietary solutions (NAS or RAID cards) where you may be tied to a particular vendor and/or model, which, after time, may not be sold/available.
Works fine with Macs and PCs -- and for this reason i use SMB shares rather than AFP. Performance is fine.
I use the SMB shares to stream to all the computers in the house, and there is no problem.
Time Machine backups are a little more complex, involving creating a Sparse Bundle (which is not the official method). https://ggvvkur.weebly.com/best-2d-drafting-software-for-mac.html. For this reason, i don't do this, i use Carbon Copy Cloner to run to a disk image (dmg) every night.
I use MediaRover to sync iTunes libraries, and this works fine. Other iTunes support is available (an iTunes/DAAP server called Firefly), but i haven't used it.
It has a BitTorrent server built in, but again, i haven't used it.
Administration is very easy (web based), setup is not difficult, but there are several steps to add disks, format them, create a RAID array, create a mount point, enable the services (AFP or SMB) to access. Documentation and community support are satisfactory.
Don't want start any flamewar, but today here is only NAS solution - the ZFS based NAS.
ZFS is a filesystem, what has 'copy on write' feature, so you will get a backup in every save - fully transparently. ZFS has million really cool features like raid management, snapshots etc. too much for one post. If you interested can duckduck for ZFS.
ZFS is implemented in Solaris and in the FreeBSD. So, you can:
- use some older (but 64bit+lots of RAM) PC with a plenty of HDDs and
- download and install FreeNAS. You will get web-managed NAS with Samba and etc.
- install plain FreeBSD and config it as NAS plus some your own tweaking - IMHO this is the best way.
- you can also buy an preconfigured FreeBSD/ZFS NAS too
You should definitely check theese: Best free dtp software for mac.
Netgear ReadyNAS
We recently joined the crowd getting their first NAS, and after taking a close look at several, settled on the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+.
The Drobo, previously mentioned, was tempting—but just way too expensive for use on a home network.
We've only had it a month or two, but so far, so good. Like most Netgear products, it works well with Macs. There's also a solid community & support site.
Western Digital MyBook World Edition
Yesterday I installed a Western Digital MyBook World Edition, 1 TeraByte, single disk.
Pros: very simple to install and work with, includes a Media Server and a iTunes server that can be used to share music and videos across the network. It's pre configured with the common shares and if you copy the files in the proper folders it's very, very simple to use. Quite cheap compared to a similar solution from QNap or Sinology. I did not perform any single task 'mac related' on it and it worked from start with my Mac.
Cons: old firmware from 2009 and no update available, the single 1 TB disk inside obviously do not support any kind of Raid, no serviceable by changing disk if needed (unless you broke your warranty), the control panel do not give you a lot of control also if you use the so called advanced version.
![Nas Nas](/uploads/1/3/3/8/133894568/699479975.jpg)
Definitively a good choice for a 'first' NAS to work and experience with, if you need to go on a cheap model or if you do not have a lot of IT experience, suggested for simple home environment where no redundancy it's needed, I would avoid it if you need redundancy or if you like to fine tune and experiment with every possible option.
There is also a public wiki about hacking it but I've not tested any of the stuff described (yet!). https://yellowgive620.weebly.com/mac-high-sierra-download-usb.html.
UPDATE: after some time I've found more problems, all related to the time machine interface:1) The quota option do not work with time machine2) The Lion update completely stopped the Time Machine usage
NOT RECOMMENDED ANYMORE!!!!
UPDATE: The Lion/Time Machine problem will hopefully be fixed soon. Apple changed some things and Western Digital is working on an update. This affects the MyBook Live and MyBook World Edition II. Read more: Error: 'The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features' is displayed using Time Machine on Mac OSX 10.7.x (Lion) to backup to a WD NAS drive
- Small footprint (same size as MyBook desktop drives)
- Size 1-3 Tb
- Pretty cheap
- TimeMachine compatible over network (firmware just got updated with support for Lion)
- Single disk, no RAID
The Qnap TS259Pro+ which uses a 1.8Ghz Dual Core Atom CPU,would be the perfect setup for Sickbeard, and streaming to more than one TV in the house. Take the firmware for a spin with this 'Live Demo'
Best Nas Storage For Mac And Pc
Seagate Blackarmor NAS220
Adobe flash player for mac 10.9.5 free download. At the moment of buying, the features listed sounded great, and Mac compatible. Ibm spss 22 mac download.
Once in the studio, and after 4 weeks, it is just a hard drive on the network.
These are some of the issues:
- NOT Time Machine compatible
- Very slow
- Access remotely is useless, hangs everytime. So you cannot access it outside the studio. This was a main reason for buying, and tech support say they know about the issue and are to update. still waiting for it.
- Software for mac is just a discovery tool. The name says it all, it tries to find the NAS, which it initially did, now it no longer detects it. Finder does.
- Only a APC brand UPS is compatible. This was a total surprise, it is only stated in small letters in the manual inside the box, not outside or anywhere else visible before you buy, not even the product web page.
- Very slow, i know i already said that, but it is terribly slow.
Stay away, not only mac users, but everybody who wants a NAS, this is not an option.
D-Link DNS-323
The D-Link DNS-323 is quite customizable, but should do everything you need out of the box.
It has a very activecommunity behind it
QNAP is surprisingly perfect actually ;o)I use TS-419 for my home use and pretty happy with it.
Pc Matic For Apple Computers
Best Nas For Both Mac And Pc
We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Best bluetooth keyboard for tablet. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.
I put together a comparison here: http://forum.railsonmaui.com/t/best-way-to-backup-large-external-hard-drives/305.
Based on reading many of the numerous reviews, the WD gets the job done at a very competitive price point with few disadvantages.
Best Nas For Mac Users
I'm ordering one this week and will plan to update my answer. I'll be using it for other network backup and shared network files.
Best Nas For Mac And Itunes
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