Best External Drives for Mac in 2026
There are a hundred external drives on Amazon. Three of them are actually worth your money.
For Time Machine on a typical home Mac, a 2TB external SSD is the sweet spot. Samsung T7 or T9 and Crucial X9 Pro are the ones I recommend most often — fast, durable, USB-C, and silent.
For photo libraries and active projects, get Thunderbolt if your Mac supports it. The OWC Envoy Pro and Samsung X5 are workhorses. The speed difference over USB-C is real when you're scrubbing 4K footage or browsing a 200,000-photo library.
For long-term archival on a budget, a spinning USB drive is fine — the WD Elements series is reliable. Just keep two copies and rotate them.
Format every new drive in Disk Utility as APFS for SSDs or Mac OS Extended Journaled for spinning disks. Don't use the Windows-formatted ExFAT it ships with — you'll lose features and run into permission headaches.
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