To format an external storage device, connect it to one of the ports on your Mac. Turn the drive on, and make sure it appears in the Finder. If the drive is internal, it should already show up in.
Once prohibitively expensive, SSDs have continued to fall in price, and external SSDs have begun to emerge as an alternative to portable hard drives, delivering as much as five times the speed. They have no platters to spin up, nor read/write heads that need to travel to a specific point on a platter to find the file you need. And because of the lack of moving parts, external or portable SSDs are usually more compact, slimmer, and better-suited to frequent travel and accidental drops than hard drives—even the most rugged ones.
Why (and Why Not) SSDs? At their hearts, hard drives are mechanical devices that use moving heads to read data stored on platters (or disks) inside the apparatus. The good news is that hard drive technology is fairly advanced (it's existed in some form or another for about 60 years), so it doesn't cost much to implement and thus buy. This means you can get comparatively huge amounts of storage capacity for very little money. But the same mechanical technology that makes hard drives such a tantalizing value proposition causes other unfortunate issues.
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If you drop the drive, you could damage the interior mechanism and make your data inaccessible. And, again, hard drives are slow because they can only find your data by physically searching for it. The fastest external drives you'll find spin at about 7,200 revolutions per minute (or rpm), which isn't really all that fast these days. For comparison, internal desktop-class hard drives can have speeds as high as 15,000rpm.
SSDs, on the other hand, store data on flash memory, and thus can access it very quickly. If you're connecting via a higher-speed protocol like USB 3.0 or, you'll see the most benefit, but there's basically no case in which an SSD won't be faster than a hard drive. And because SSDs have no moving parts, they're a lot hardier, and are better equipped to withstand the drops, bumps, and bruises of everyday use. This doesn't mean they can't be damaged or that you can't still lose data, but you have a lot more leeway. One downside is that the memory used in these drives can only be written to a limited number of times, so your SSD may become unusable before a hard drive would, depending on how you use it.
Another regards traditional storage applications: Hardware-based encryption is, in almost every case, a no-go on SSDs, because data is stored anywhere and everywhere rather than in one easily accessible chunk. And you should never, under any circumstances, run a defragmentation program on your SSD, as you'll be using up valuable writes for no speed benefit you're likely to notice. Perhaps the biggest drawback of SSDs is price. Want a 2TB external hard drive? You can find one for as little as $75. A 2TB external SSD, on the other hand, will run you about $730, and no, that is not a typo—you'd be paying almost 10 times as much for exactly the same amount of storage.
(That same $75 you could spend on the 2TB hard drive will only get you an SSD of about 120GB.) If speed and resilience are critical to you, all that extra money is probably worth it. If they're not, you're needlessly wasting hundreds of dollars.
When considering whether to buy an external SSD, make sure you know what you're getting yourself—and your bank account—into. For more on solid-state drives versus hard drives, read. Cost per gigabyte: The way to calculate relative value on drives like these is to perform some simple division, and calculate the cost per gigabyte based on the pricing for a given drive on the day you're shopping. Because SSD pricing fluctuates all the time, relative value changes all the time, too. Like with internal SSDs, the way to weigh what you are paying is to divide the price of the SSD by the number of gigabytes in its capacity.
So, for example, a $100 120GB portable drive yields a cost per gigabyte of about 83 cents; a $100 250GB drive, in contrast, comes in at 40 cents per gig. The basement for budget external SSDs at this writing was about 25 cents per gigabyte, mostly models from second- or third-tier makers. Use this math to calculate your bottom-line price when comparing a host of drives. Interface: At the moment, most portable SSDs use standard USB 3.0, though USB Type-C ports are increasingly common.
This has no speed consequence, but it's an easier connector to plug in. ADATA's SE730 External SSD and Samsung's Portable SSD T5 use both a USB-C port (at the drive end) and the new USB 3.1 Gen 2 tech (at the host end) for the fastest possible speeds. In our testing, however, neither drive was massively faster over the new port type. They're still plenty speedy if plugged into a USB 3.0 port. A few pricey external SSDs come with Thunderbolt interfaces, but these are generally specialized models meant for use with Macs. Ruggedization: The degree of ruggedness does vary from drive to drive, with ADATA's SE730 offering leading the field at the moment among mainstream-price drives. IP68 certification is a good spec to look for if you're serious about waterproof and dustproof drives.
Carry Weight: Most SSDs weigh a negligible few ounces. We're partial to the retention loop on the SanDisk Extreme drives, as many of these drives are small and light enough that losing them is too easy and expensive a mistake to make.
Do Yourself a Solid Below are the top external SSDs we've tested recently. They vary widely in features and price, but should all deliver plenty of speed and peace of mind if that's what you want from your portable storage. Don't need (or don't want to pay for) an SSD? Then check out our roundup of the. If you're building or upgrading your desktop or laptop, read about. For other ways to preserve your data, read our lists of the, the top,. Pros: Speedy performance.
Highly ruggedized against crush, immersion, shock, environment, altitude, and chemicals. One year of data recovery service protection.
Backup and encryption software included. Cons: Bulky and heavy.
Short warranty. Bottom Line: If you and your files need to venture into the unknown, the ioSafe Rugged Portable SSD might be the trusty, nearly indestructible companion you're looking for. But for the average user, there are plenty of durable, reasonably priced external drives with higher capacity.
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