Seagate Backup Plus Fast portable is the best external hard drive for both windows and mac and gives a brilliantly fast performance with affordable price.Seagate Backup Plus is available in four different capacities like 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and known as high capacity budget external hard drive.

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.

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).

Best External Drive For Lightroom On Mac 2018

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

Best External Hard Drive For Mac 2018

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.

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.

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.

Lightroom for the iPad is here. It’s called Lightroom Mobile, and it runs smoothly on anything down to an iPad 2 (or first-gen mini). You can use the app to edit and organize any photos in your Lightroom collections, and it syncs automatically (and near instantly) with Lightroom on your desktop (you’ll need to upgrade to v5.4).

And the price? It’s free, but only if you already subscribe to Adobe’s $10-per-month Photoshop Photography Program, which also gets you the desktop versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. There’s also a 30-day free trial to check it out.

So how does it work? Lets take a nice long look.

How It works

LR Mobile works with Smart Previews, the compressed DNG (RAW) files that were added in Lightroom 5. On the desktop Smart Previews allow you to store your big RAW files on an external drive and keep the smaller Smart Previews on your MacBook Air’s little SSD, while retaining full edit capabilities. Now they also work on the iPad.

Photos are synced using Collections, the basic organizational unit of Lightroom.

Collections

Lightroom Mobile only works as a companion app to the desktop version. To use it, you sign in to both versions with your Apple ID. You’ll now see some new double-headed arrow icons on the left side of your collections. Just click these arrows and that collection is now synced with LR Mobile. Any edits you make in one place are almost instantly reflected in the other.

This is because LR Mobile is pretty much an online app. It pulls in the images on demand, downloading them from Adobe’s servers. If you like, you can mark a collection for offline editing, but in practice the whole thing is so fast you don’t really need to (on Wi-Fi anyway – you might eat your entire month’s bandwidth pretty quick on 3G or LTE)

The Interface

The interface has been well thought out. It’s as simple as can be, but no simpler. Taps, swipes and pinches all have their place, as do two and three finger taps – a two-finger tap cycles the metadata display in any view, and a three-fingers tap toggles the before/after view of your edits.

The main screen shows your collections, and introduces the sorting options that appear in all views – tap the text at the top of the screen to access this picker:

… and sort by import date, title, size or status.

Each collection has a play icon and an ellipsis. The play icon starts a slideshow (more below), and the ellipses brings up this neat options panel:

This lets you add photos from the iPad’s camera roll (or any other folder), enable offline editing, rename the collection or remove it and enable auto-import.

Auto Import tell LR Mobile to take any new photos from your camera roll and import them into this collection. It only works with the camera roll though – you can’t set it to grab picture from a certain folder, or from your imports directory.

Viewing

Once inside the collection, you can swipe and tap to navigate and open pictures, and use the sorting options to sort and filter the images. Thus you could show all rejected photos, ordered by size. The sorting option popover stays active on the screen until you dismiss it by tapping elsewhere, so you can quickly cycle through views until you get the one you want.

Then we come to the main picture view. You can view the image alone, or with overlays (a one-finger tap switches views), and cycles the overlays between the standard EXIF data and color histogram you are familiar with from desktop LR. Pinch or double-tap to zoom, and swipe up or down to flag or reject an image.

This gesture, the vertical swipe to set (and reset) flags, combined with swiping left and right to switch photos, is way, way better than picking and viewing on the Mac. It’s quicker, more intuitive (thumbs UP and thumbs DOWN), and more comfortable, becasue you can do it from the sofa. If you like things old school, you can tap the pick status icon at bottom left to cycle the options.

You can also share photos from this view, using the share arrow at top right. This takes you to the standard iOS 7 sharing sheet, where you can remove the image entirely, move or copy the photo to another collection (copying doesn’t actually create a new file – it works more like tagging), or start a slideshow.

Slideshows

Slideshows are actually pretty neat, and you get a choice of transitions as well as control over how long a photo is on screen.

They don’t seem to play well with AirPlay though. You can force it through mirroring, but I can’t get regular AirPlay to work.

At the bottom of the screen you’ll see these four icons. They each toggle a different view. The first is what I call the “timeline view,” which shows you a row of thumbnails from the current collection. This lets you quickly navigate while still viewing an photo/ It’s great for comparisons between shots – just tap on a picture to open it.

And then we get on to the other views, all of which are for editing your picture.

Editing

The LR Mobile “Develop Module” is limited compared to the desktop version, but you get a lot of control. If you think of it in terms of other iPad editing apps then you’ll be pretty pleased with what it can do. If you think of it in terms of the original Lightroom 1.0, you’ll be amazed.

The three develop views are for Adjustments, Presets and Crop. Crop is the simplest, with options for various fixed aspect ratios. And cropping, like all edits in LR on either the iPad or the desktop, is lossless and fully reversible.

Basic

The basic edit view gives you all the tools from the Basic panel in desktop LR, allowing adjustments for exposure,m clarity, white balance (including a white balance picker loupe), clarity, vibrance and saturation.

Adjustments are applied by tapping the appropriate control and then using the horizontal slider. It’s a bit like Snapseed, only without the up-and-down part (up and down swipes control the pick/reject flags, even here). The number next to the adjustment updates to show how much of an effect you’ve applied.
There’s also a reset button here that lets you reset various parameters. You can reset to how the image was when you opened it this time, or back to when it was first imported. You can also reset the “basic tones,” (the adjustments of exposure and so on) or “All,” which nukes everything. You get thumbnails showing the results of you action too, which is awesome.

Effects and Presets


Here you can use Lightroom’s develop presets. Right now you’re limited to the ones that come built in to LR on the desktop, but they’re good. During a demo on Friday I asked if user presets were coming, and the answer was as you’d expect – it’s something the Adobe folks want to do, but not yet.

Presets are shown as thumbnail previews, making selection easy. I find them a little heavy handed compared to the effects you can get in other iPad apps, but that’s almost moot – these are the exact same effects that you get on the desktop. Which brings me to…

Sync

If you make a crop or add an effect or anything else, the changes are synced back to LR on the desktop, and vice-versa. And it’s almost instant (depending on your network speed of course) So, while you can’t use your own presets yet, or apply some of the weirder or more advanced edits (lens corrections, curves and so on), you can apply these on the desktop and see the results on the iPad.

Sync uses its own storage, aside from the 20GB Creative Cloud storage you get when you sign up for your $10 per month account.

How To Kinda Use Your Own Presets

And here’s a great hack for you. There’s a little “Previous” button at the bottom right of the Basic and Presets views. This lets you apply the edits from the previous photo that you edited or viewed.
So, if you apply a lens correction, or a crazy, psychedelic set of curves to a photo in LR on your Mac, you can apply those same edits on Lightroom Mobile – just view the edited photo, then switch to another one (use the film-strip/timeline view for this as you need to switch straight to the next picture) and choose to apply the previous edit.

This even works with frickin nutso edits like the one above, made using curves and the clone tool, plus a radial filter. In theory, you could apply a set of presets to a set of photos, put those photos in a collection, sync that collection and then apply those edits using the Previous button, but it’s not exactly easy.

What LR Mobile Doesn’t Do

Here’s my wish list:

iPhone version just for adding photos. I take a ton of pictures on my iPhone, and I want them in LR. Right now I have to do that via desktop import, or via the iPad using Photo Stream, which is a) lame and b) doesn’t give full-res photos. An import-only version of LR for the iPhone would be great. Bonus marks for making it upload in the background like Flickr

Auto-import of imported photos. I’d like to be able to auto- import anything that comes onto my iPad via the camera connection kit. Currently, auto-import into LR Mobile collections is from the camera roll only. I understand that the iPad version can’t handle RAW files, but as I shoot JPG on my X100S I don’t care.Also, what about importing the JPG previews from RAW photos and then syncing these up with the RAWs when I import them to the desktop?

RAW+Smart Preview. This is one for camera manufacturers. We can shoot RAW+JPG. What about RAW+Smart preview. Awe-some.

Conclusion

Best External Hard Drive For Lightroom

This isn’t Lightroom on the go. It’s a companion app to LR on the desktop. And once you get used to that, you’re going to love it. It does a large chunk of what you would do on the desktop, only on the iPad. These days I hardly do much more than simple edits in Lightroom anyway, the odd tweak here and there, plus marking as a pick or a reject.

And for the handful of photos I do want to spend more time on, there’s always the Mac.

Best External Drive For Lightroom On Mac 2018 Update

I’m excited about this. Lightroom on the Mac also started out dead simple, but always lightning fast. Then it added more and more tricks, but never at the expense of it’s core purpose. I expect that, with the yearly update cycle removed, LR Mobile will be evolving even faster.

Best External Drive For Lightroom On Mac 2018 Holiday

Source: App Store
Source: Adobe Lightroom blog

⇐ ⇐ Do I Have To Uninstall Quicken For The Mac To Upgrade To 2018?
⇒ ⇒ Mindjet Mindmanager 2018 For Mac