The best things in life don’t always come easy. For a Mac user, buying the best external hard drive for their computer is a must but how does one determine which drive is the best? We explained some of the factors to consider in our buyer’s guide. If you’ve taken a look at that buyer’s guide, then reading the rest of this article would help you chose the drive that suits your needs and your pocket and perhaps, help a friend of yours who is still scouring search engines for the best external hard drive for mac 2018. Now, to what you’ve been waiting for The Best External Hard Drive for Mac 2018 Whether you’re using the MacBook with the Touch Bar or you’ve got an old Mac with a USB 3.0 port, this table below shows you a list of some of the best external portable hard drives that will give you a value for your money including their features such as storage size, interfaces, weight and the OS they are compatible with.

An external drive is also the best place to keep a full system backup that's available for an emergency restore if you computer can't boot. Fortunately, you can find a speedy, high-quality 1TB USB.

So, shall we? – Time machine compatible The Buffalo Mini Station is an excellent drive for Mac. It stands out of its group as a reliable drive which gives users a value for their money – other drives in the Mini Station series include the Buffalo Mini Station plus, the Buffalo Mini Station Air (Wireless) as well as the Buffalo Mini Station Extreme NFC (a fast and rugged drive). The Buffalo Mini Station comes in two variants; the Buffalo Mini Station with Thunderbolt and the Buffalo Mini Station with USB 3.0. We made mention of the Buffalo Mini Station with Thunderbolt in our article on the has to offer. The Buffalo Mini Station drive measures roughly 4.5 x 3.0 x 0.6 inch and weighs about 0.5 pounds.

The drive comes with three storage capacity options; 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. For Mac users who are keen on backing up their data using Time Machine, the Buffalo Mini Station is more than ready to handle the task since it is time machine compatible.

The drive is quite small and its casing is made of plastic which leaves it susceptible to breaking at any time. The drive comes with a two-year warranty and is shipped with the USB cable.

According to information on the BuffaloTech Website, the drive is preformatted for Mac in HFS+ format and so it requires reformatting for it to be able to work with Windows. – Portable RAID of Macworld described the WD My Passport Pro with four simple words: A hefty portable RAID! Yet in spite of its size, the drive is humble when it comes to power consumption as it is bus powered.

No other drive transfer’s files faster than the Passport pro as it makes use of its integrated Thunderbolt cable to move your data faster than you can say the word “transfer”. If that’s not enough, you’ve got two RAID options to select from to achieve blazing transfer speeds – RAID 0 is default – as well as JBOD. The My Passport Pro was the first Thunderbolt enabled drive Western Digital released for Mac users. An all metal enclosure houses the main 2.5 inches 5400 rpm SATA drives. WD provided two storage capacity options of 2TB and 4TB so you do not have to worry about filling up the storage device quickly although it’s quite easy for storage hard drives to get filled up nowadays. The drive is Time Machine compatible and is formatted out of the box in HFS+ format.