
- EXTERNAL USB BACKUP DRIVE PORTABLE
- EXTERNAL USB BACKUP DRIVE PLUS
- EXTERNAL USB BACKUP DRIVE MAC
MacOS Catalina and newer: We have seen good results with the Samsung T5 Portable SSD on macOS Catalina.
EXTERNAL USB BACKUP DRIVE MAC
Especially if you were planning to use an external SSD as a primary startup disk, or if you tend to reboot your Mac a lot, we recommend that you avoid using these two external SSDs with High Sierra and Mojave. This delay can occur whether you're trying to boot your Mac from the external SSD, or even when you're booting your Mac from its internal disk. The Samsung T5 and the Transcend StoreJet SSD introduce a lengthy delay to the beginning of the startup process when High Sierra or Mojave is installed onto them and when they are APFS formatted.
Samsung T5 Portable SSD and Transcend StoreJet SSD : If you have one of these devices you can format the device with Apple's legacy "Mac OS Extended, Journaled" format instead of APFS, and use it for data-only backups.
G-Technology G-DRIVE Mobile USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive. Western Digital My Passport Ultra Portable. EXTERNAL USB BACKUP DRIVE PLUS
Seagate Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive. The following disks are examples of these slower devices, and we do not recommend using these for macOS bootable backups: Unfortunately, APFS is not tuned to perform well on rotational disks, and that performance is just unacceptable on these "slowest of the slow" rotational disks. These disks are cheap and can be acquired by the palette at your local Costco. Some devices that leverage SMR include:ĥ400RPM Rotational HDDs, aka "Slim", "Portable" or 2.5" hard drives: Many vendors have not been particularly forthright about the use of SMR in their devices until recently. We anticipate considerably worse performance for APFS in particular on these devices. Several years ago Seagate introduced Shingled Magnetic Recording to increase the storage capacity of rotational hard drives, but at the expense of writing performance. Avoid disks that use Shingled Magnetic Recording We offer some general advice here, though, and a small collection of specific devices that are very popular, but known to not serve well as bootable backup disks for macOS. WD Black Performance Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5"īefore purchasing any enclosure, be sure to check whether any known compatibility issues pertain to that device. These drives are "bare" and will need an enclosure or dock to be used externally Oyen Digital MiniPro Dura 2.5" SATA to USB 3.1 external Hard Drive/SSD Enclosure Bare mechanical drive (SATA) 500GB - 6 TB Oyen Novus External USB-C Rugged Desktop Hard Drive Enclosure USB 3.1, External Enclosure (without a disk) HighPoint RocketStor RS5212 Thunderbolt Storage Dock Oyen Novus External USB-C Rugged Desktop Hard Drive (2TB-16TB) Thunderbolt, Desktop External Hard Drive Enclosure (without a disk) USB 3.1, Gen 2 Desktop External Hard Drive (7,200 RPM mechanical drive) Samsung T5 Portable SSD (1TB & 2 TB) - Recommended only for macOS 10.15 Catalina and newer. Oyen Digital U32 Shadow External SSD USB-C (1-4TB) ( UK) This is our top pick for a bootable backup device: These devices offer a moderate amount of storage and excellent performance. USB-C equipped Macs can work well from a USB-C (USB 3.1) equipped hard drive, especially if the disk inside of the enclosure is an SSD. If you opt for a USB-only device, pre-2015 Macs will be slower when booting from that device. However, we frequently get asked for a recommendation, so here's a list of some hard drive enclosures that we have tested with good results. It would be nearly impossible for us to curate an exhaustive list of every enclosure/Mac combination that does and does not work. Most hard drive enclosures will work just fine for your backups, however, some cannot function as a bootable device. Backing up to a FireWire device is fine, but if you need a bootable backup, you should use a device that can be attached to your Mac via USB or Thunderbolt. it's older than 2012), a USB device may boot your Mac, but performance will be considerably slower than your Mac's internal hard drive.Ĭatalina users: Apple no longer supports booting a Mac from a FireWire-attached device. Thunderbolt+USB). If your Mac does not offer native USB 3.0 support (e.g. We generally recommend purchasing an enclosure that offers multiple interface options (e.g. Any of these interfaces will work fine for backing up and safeguarding your data. Many hard drive enclosures have Firewire, USB, Thunderbolt or a combination of interfaces for connecting the hard drive to your computer.